


Son of the Nuclear A-Bomb

by nimmieamee



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Horror Elements, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 03:22:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4730993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan said, "My father can't die. They can't make a coffin big enough for my father."</p><p>"Your father could make a coffin big enough for your father," said the man. "Your father could make a coffin big enough for the whole wide world."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

One summer, Niall installed Matthew and Aurora in a loft apartment in the city and sent Declan off to music lessons. Declan was growing into someone they had to be rid of. 

Niall and Ronan could then explore. 

This was only worth doing because there was the lush and green Barns to return to at the end of the season. Ronan worried about it constantly. 

"Who looks after the cows?" he asked Niall. 

"I have a crop of men there to look after the cows," Niall would say. 

"And what if they don't want to leave when we get back?" Ronan asked. 

"What they want really doesn't matter," Niall said. 

In a crumbling building under the shadow of a bridge, they met a fat old man. He was cooking something squished-up that Ronan refused to touch. 

"So this one is like you," the man said amiably. 

"What does that mean?" Ronan said. 

"He doesn't swallow what's good for him either," sighed the man. He jerked a withered thumb in Niall's direction. 

Ronan hated the man. The man's gums were bright and hideous, and each remaining scraggly tooth looked to Ronan like an evil pearl in a rotten oyster. 

"Why are you still alive?" Ronan demanded. 

Niall threw back his head and laughed and laughed. In the sweltering two-room apartment, just like the one Niall said he'd tolerated for a time when he'd first come to this country, Ronan's legs stuck to the plastic layered on the couch. The rest of him was not uncomfortable. He and Niall could wear heavy coats and still keep cool. That was what Niall was like. Anything Niall gave you was a peculiar gift.

"I'll die soon, and the devils will come here and scream and scream because they finally have me," said the man. "But the sound of the trains on the bridge will drown them out. No one will notice. Maybe when they come for your father. Then. Then they will be heard. Your father will die like a bomb going off."

This frightened Ronan. He looked at the heavy gold cross on the wall, but Jesus hung there stupidly. INRI, Jesus said, through a scroll like a speech bubble above his head. Ronan had only just learned to read, out of books that sometimes ran out of pages. Ronan did not know what INRI meant. Ronan did not know what it meant when his father said he'd grown too tired and lazy to put in the end parts of the books. 

"No one's coming to take my father," Ronan said. If they did come, Niall would not go with them. Ronan glared at the ugly apartment, the tacky flowered curtains, the aloe vera plant dying on the windowsill, the small boxy television. Ronan decided that he would like to see the devils try and take Niall. Niall was not something to take. It would be like trying to gather up the way the stars could tint the river silver. 

The old man had put his squishy things in a paper towel and was now making steak. It had a heavy smell that weighed down the whole room. He had said before that it was the only thing Niall had ever wanted to eat when he'd first come here from Ireland: steak and deli sandwiches and apple pie, every night date night. Then Niall had discovered living with money, and it was all hotel food for months, and then Niall had discovered living with his own plot of land, and it was wild plum tarts and fresh cream and slaughtered pig and pretending he'd eaten the same back in Ireland.

Now the man said, "I mean that he'll die. Niall, your son isn't so quick."

Niall made a rude and manly gesture, loose-bones about it. Ronan said, "My father can't die. They can't make a coffin big enough for my father."

Niall laughed again. Niall was an enormous man, tall and broad and very alive. 

"Your father could make a coffin big enough for your father," said the man, with the maddening logic of the elderly. "Your father could make a coffin big enough for the whole wide world."

-

There would never be a coffin big enough for Gansey. Metaphorically, it would be like trying to bury a war hero or a president. Too much symbolism and all-American good looks. No one's mind flashed to a plain pine box when they thought of JFK. They thought broader. Money and great tragedy, the hallmarks of a whole era. Gansey could make you think of that just by picking up the phone, or rolling up his sleeves. 

Also literally. There would never be a coffin big enough. Gansey waved his tanned forearm at several beleaguered American University students. "No, not that one. Glendower's personal guard was famed throughout the British Isles for being more than six feet, all of them. That one can't have been more than five-eight."

The students did not know what they were doing, or why they were suddenly under Gansey's command. Their professor was not sure either. The Henrietta homeowner whose property this was did not know -- she only seemed to know that, having had found coffins in the yard, she might get some money out of it. But only a pleased University dean back in D.C. had seen any money so far, courtesy of Gansey, who treated all promising archeological finds like they were his as a matter of birthright.

Gansey surveyed the dig now with an expectant, powerful expression. It seemed to say that there was something greater going on -- there could be _knowledge_ inside these coffins. Maybe. If these boxes of dirt and bone were big enough to hold it. 

He shouted out more orders and several of the stronger-looking students heaved coffins where he directed. Others produced measuring tools. Still others looked at Gansey and adjusted their tank tops and t-shirts in a hopeful way. Two long-legged girls offered him drinks out of their canteens. They looked crushed when he produced an own overpriced iced coffee and used it to wave them in the direction of the larger graves.

"Not like that," Blue said, from where she was sitting on the verandah watching the dig unfold. "You're--that's a centuries' old grave you're manhandling! Here, I'll show you what he means."

She leapt down from the verandah and began to the girls. Ronan snuck a glance at Gansey and saw him looking peculiarly pleased, a strange and furtive look on Gansey.

This was not Ronan's affair and he knew it. Something needled him nonetheless. He could not tell what, whether it was the fact that Gansey -- who had declared he would not pick favorites -- was picking a favorite; or whether it was the alien girl-ness of Blue Sargent in general; or whether it was that she was not so alien, not anymore. She was a friend, raw and honest, with a house full of insanity and a death list and a very real grasp on her own kind of magic.

This unsettled Ronan. Blue Sargent was a mirror in more ways than one. 

"She has no idea what she's doing either," he told Gansey. "They don't teach archaeology at Henrietta Shithole High."

Gansey looked at him disapprovingly, but then said, "Jane! Let them work!"

Blue stomped back, looking annoyed. She eyed Ronan.

"Did you say something to him?" she said.

"I outlined your lack of credentials," Ronan said. "No one wants you breaking the tibia off some dead fuck from the sixteenth century."

"Ex _cuse_ me--"

"Please," Gansey said simply. Blue stopped. 

Ronan said, "Well, it's not like you can pay for it if you break it," and turned on his heel.

He knew even before he opened the screen door to the house that it would have no effect. With Adam-and-Gansey, mentioning money was dangling a dead rat by its tail. No one wanted to touch the topic, but everyone noticed, and the mood soured instantly. Not so with Gansey-and-Blue. An explosion could not rearrange those dynamics.

It made Ronan feel trapped and too large for his body. He barged past the local access camera crew, the homeowner reclining in her laz-e-boy and describing the thrill of discovery. Several people squawked and several more shot up hurriedly and began adjusting lenses and things, cursing all the while. Ronan punched the boom mic as he went out the door to the front yard, prompting yet more squawking.

His car sat behind the Camaro in the driveway, closest to the curb. He was supposed to have picked Adam up and brought him along, but Adam had met him briefly outside the trailer factory to report that there was a chance for double-shifts today. It was a chance like a chance of rain, or a chance of economic downturn. Ronan did not welcome it. Adam did not welcome it, except in the general relieved way that he welcomed any extra income. The chance came anyway. 

Ronan rested his hands on the steering wheel and his head on his forearms. His phone buzzed from the floor of the car. He kicked it under the seat. It was probably Declan. 

With Adam gone, Blue-and-Gansey unfurled itself guiltily. Ronan did not want to deal with it. He wished Noah were here, at least, but Noah was a fading thing now. Ronan had brought the problem to Adam. Adam had filed it with the other problems he had: the rent, Aglionby tuition, college interviews, standardized testing. 

The same ugly thought came to Ronan that always came these days:

_What happens next?_

Ronan had not thought about the future in any concrete way for some time. The future was whatever Gansey said it was. It was someday returning to the Barns. It was Glendower. Maybe it was nothing. 

But over the summer he'd begun to care. _What comes next._ He knew the exact moment. Popping open the trunk of a white Mistubishi, relieved that what came next included Matthew. What comes next, what comes next. Hitherto it had been the realm of Gansey, who made plans for that kind of thing. Or Adam, who made sacrifices for it. Ronan did neither; he was like Cabeswater, like Noah, existing as though time itself had no meaning. Blue's gaggle of psychics always seemed on the verge of arguing that this was the case. A few months ago, Ronan would have carelessly agreed. He did agree. What was time, to people like them?

But still, perversely, he found himself lingering in the halls of St. Agnes after Sunday mass, climbing the back stair, laying the groundwork for the coming week. What comes next, what comes next. 

What comes next starts here and now. Me and you.

He went to St. Agnes now, letting himself into the empty apartment with the spare key he'd dreamed up under Adam's watchful eye. He'd offered Adam the copy. Adam had demurred with a shrug. Ronan hadn't known what to make of the gesture. It was something out of a dream -- it occurred without careful design, without an efficient intelligent cause. This was not typical for Adam.

It was unseasonably hot for the time of year, and so the apartment was sweltering, as though it had captured all the heat outside and all the heat from the church candles below to boot. Ronan peeled off his jacket and shirt and abandoned both on one of Adam's cheap plastic bins. In the bathroom, the water in the sink was running. Ronan ducked inside and turned the tap closed. It swiveled back the other way and continued to run. Ronan closed it. It swiveled open. Closed. Open. Closed. Open.

It was a battle of wills. The cheap plumbing was determined to defy him. Ronan considered breaking the sink and then either dreaming a replacement, or else paying the church staff to install a new one while Adam was gone. But then he remembered -- Adam had explained this. It was not the plumbing, but Cabeswater, calling on him for something. On a double-shift day, no less. Ronan could not understand what it wanted, so he had no choice but to let it call. He stomped back into the main room and stretched out on the mattress. He wondered if Cabeswater could reach Adam at the factory. It would be a nightmare. The machines screeching out Latin, sparks everywhere, leaves winding around Adam's work station. The prelude to some horrible industrial accident. 

He was the Greywaren. He was Cabeswater's Greywaren. He should go to Cabeswater, and instruct it to shut the fuck up. 

Before he pulled on his shirt again, there was a knock at the door. No one was there when Ronan opened it. That meant it was someone only Adam would be able to see. Ronan thought of ghost-visions flooding the factory floor and swore. He gathered up his clothes without bothering to put them on and thundered down the stairs.

He collided with Robert Parrish.

Ronan could hardly process it. Never mind that it was illegal -- fathers and legality were not remotely complementary concepts in Ronan's mind -- it was just dumb as shit. There were still people milling around this side of St. Agnes: the Father in his office down the hall, Mrs. Ramirez at her desk in the rectory, Brother Paul talking something over in the courtyard with the pious Henriettans who ran the local food pantry. If Robert Parrish was looking to terrorize his son, this was a poor time to do it.

"You?" Robert said. There were some lines of Adam in him, in his thin mouth and the line of his chin. But where Adam was colorless, like all vibrancy had been leached out of him, Robert Parrish was yellow and sallow from his hair to his skin, soaked in the color of fear. Not his. Other people's. There was no fear when he looked at Ronan, standing shirtless in the stairwell. Robert Parrish's lip curled in disgust. He swore.

Ronan felt a black rage so pure it was intoxicating.

"He get you to pay for the rest of that partial scholarship?" Robert said mockingly. Moving fast -- faster than Ronan expected for such a big man -- he knocked past Ronan and was up the stairs, shouting. "This is what you're doing now? This is what you do when you leave my house?"

Ronan had a grip his shoulder before he reached the door. He realized blindly that he didn't know if he'd locked it after him. Robert Parrish would enter and somehow that seemed the worst possible outcome. Ronan tried to shove him away. In response, Robert's hand found Ronan's arm and twisted it back, his fingers found Ronan's jaw and forced his face to the wall. Ronan's remaining arm lunged for him, and they grappled. Ronan could feel his skin bruising under Robert's fingertips, and knew now where Adam had gotten those little pinpricks of blue-purple along his neck and jaw last winter, knew just how Adam had been handled. He grimaced, and tried to throw Robert off, but Robert was as large as he was and positioned to do more damage.

"You know what the people in this town will think of you?" Robert spat. He addressed the door, not Ronan. "Your bosses, and Boyd down at the garage? You think any of them will want to work with you when I tell them?"

Ronan kneed him in gut and managed to knock him onto the uppermost landing. It felt wild and satisfying when his knuckles connected with Robert Parrish's nose, his cheekbones, his jaw. After four good hits, Robert gave up on trying to throw him off and grabbed his wrists instead, twisting his arms and exerting pressure. It was clever and rough and Ronan spared a second to hate himself because he had not been expecting it. Robert's long, practiced fingers -- very like his son's -- threatened to snap the bone. If Ronan reeled back or tried to force his way out of the grip, the threat might become a reality.

The door to the apartment swung open. 

Ronan's head jerked up. He knew no one was there, but it was instinct, the same startled head swivel that Chainsaw demonstrated when someone they knew entered a room. Robert Parrish looked up in a lazier way, dropping Ronan's wrists like his task was done. He was satisfied. He hadn't come here for Ronan.

The figure in the door might have been Adam, for a half-second. It was tall enough and thin enough. Dust motes danced in the space it occupied, like a parody of the apartment's rightful inhabitant.

Ronan hadn't seen even the shape of it before, this Cabeswater vision. Now it came forward, formed itself into a gaunt, black-skinned, black-suited man in a bowler. His shirt was so white and crisp that a Gansey could wear it. His eye sockets were smooth and empty bowls in his fine-boned face. His feet did not touch the ground. The toes were pointed down above a slow trickle of water that crept across the threshold and onto the landing.

Adam's sink had flooded. The water did not ebb out and fill the apartment, but cut a careful path out of the bathroom, around the mattress and through the labyrinth of plastic bins, out onto the landing. When it reached Robert Parrish it became a thorny vine. The vine became a whip. The whip had Robert by the neck.

Ronan was off him in an instant, pressed against the wall of the stairwell. When Robert screamed he sounded inhuman, like a dog that was being kicked. He struggled uselessly with the vine as it dragged him up, up, up, so that he was level with the Cabeswater vision.

The vision gave him an amiable smile. When it opened its mouth, its teeth were white and shining for a single instant. Each tooth became a wriggling, elongating white worm with a small fanged mouths, crawling out past the vision's lips and down its chin. Robert shoved at it, but his hands passed through it.

It did not speak Latin, but the older language of the puzzle box. It was a garbled-sounding language. Ronan understood now why Adam said he thought it liked to speak through water. Vowels came bubbling out, as though the black-suited man were addressing Robert from the bottom of a lake. 

_Leave your son the fuck alone_ , said the black-suited man.

Or something like that. Ronan supplied the meaning well enough, even as his hands shook. He looked on with something too terrified to be called real satisfaction. The wriggly worms slunk a trail down the front of the suit and everywhere they passed stripped itself away to reveal bark, like the inside of the man was a tree. Ronan wondered distantly if the vision knew Orphan Girl, if they were the same somehow.

The thorny vine dropped Robert Parrish. The suited man blinked out of sight. Adam's father choked for air and grabbed at his throat. Ronan wondered if his son had ever done the same, if Robert had ever lifted him up by the neck. 

The morning of the PSAT, Ronan remembered, Adam had come to school with livid purple around his collar.

Ronan caught Robert Parrish's shoulder and shoved him down the stairs. 

At the lower landing, Robert collided with two people -- Brother Paul and Mrs. Ramirez -- who were staring up at Adam's apartment in silent horror. Robert shoved Mrs. Ramirez and ran down to the ground floor. Cursing, Ronan followed him. Parrish was in his car by the time Ronan reached him, frantically scrabbling for his keys. Ronan put a warning hand on the open window. Robert's face shot up, horrified. Good.

Ronan did not want to lie, but now the threats from before filled up his ears. 

_You know what the people in this town will think of you. You think any of them will want to work with you when I tell them?_

Ronan did not care what Henrietta thought of him. Ronan did not care if a series of sinkholes swallowed the town's most significant shopping centers. But the threat had not been directed at Ronan.

"You see what happens?" Ronan growled. "When you try to hurt him? You see what happens to you?"

He leaned in. 

"Keep your fucking mouth shut," Ronan said. 

Miracle of miracles, Adam's hideous father nodded. If it could be called a miracle. When one viper subdued another, it was probably nothing holy.

As the battered pickup sped away, Ronan turned and found himself face-to-face with the church staff. Most of them. Not just Mrs. Ramirez, but the other three women from the rectory. Not just Brother Paul, but the Father too. They looked as though they'd been talking. 

"Son," Brother Paul began, then broke off. He stared at Ronan, standing there shirtless in the sun, his tattoo an offensive hedge of spikes and brambles.

Ronan had a complicated relationship with St. Agnes. It was holy. It could be bought. The two thoughts sat uneasily in his mind, and often he found himself comparing it unfavorably with St. Agatha's, which lay closer to the Barns. 

St. Agatha's was too far from Aglionby. And it would be a pain to move Adam, and to explain. 

Ronan reached for his checkbook.

-

Niall did not return in time for Christmas one year, and when he did return Ronan did not want to speak to him. Ronan was living in his office and sleeping with the cows.

"Moo, baby boy blue," Niall said cheerfully, sometime in March when he finally arrived. His accent curled lazily around his vowels. Ronan had missed it, and felt the sharp pain of hearing it layered on casual, like nothing was wrong. So he stayed stubbornly silent, wrapped up in blankets he'd found in a trunk under the desk, blankets that were always warm no matter the season. They smelled like cow dung now.

"I have lizards," Niall informed him. He did have lizards. Their eyes were wrong, though, not slitted lizard eyes but blinking and blue eyes like a baby's, like Matthew's. Ronan shoved them away.

"Oh, no, now I have to give these to Declan," Niall said. He let the lizards loose in the hay, where they turned around and around, following their tails, unsure of their place in the world now that they had no Niall to carry them around in his pockets.

"Come with me," Niall said.

Ronan shook his head, even though he wanted to go. He had been refusing to bathe and he stank and he hoped Niall smelled it. 

Niall lifted Ronan up easily.

"I don't want to!" Ronan shrieked. "I don't want to!"

"Doesn't matter," Niall said. He carried Ronan out of the Barns, turned down the drive, and ducked past a corner of the orchard to reach the pond. He stepped onto the pier and dropped Ronan in. The water was cold and Ronan screamed, but Niall said, "Don't be a baby. What did I pay for those swimming lessons for?" and jumped in after him, clothes and all. Ronan saw him dive to the bottom and when he came up he was holding great handfuls of gold coins, which he dropped lazily on the shore. He offered one to Ronan. Ronan shook his head.

"That's the trouble with children today," Niall informed him. "Don't know the value of a Spanish doubloon." But when he saw that still Ronan would not talk, he shrugged and said, "Alright, that's boring," and dove under again.

This time he brought up a fat toad. It croaked, and the sound was not a croak but a merry fiddle. Its wide, ugly mouth opened and several snow-white lilies tumbled out.

He didn't offer it to Ronan but just positioned it on a rock, then kicked back and floated in the cold water, regarding it. Ronan's teeth were chattering, but Niall did not look cold, and in fact Niall was probably not cold, and Ronan was furious. After several minutes of stubborn silence from Ronan, Niall swam to the shore. He was instantly in a patch of sun, large and loose-limbed and drying. He rested on his elbows and stared at the defiant child in the pond. Dead lizards floated up around Ronan. Niall must have forgotten to remove them from his pockets. Ronan told him so rather petulantly. 

"So you do talk," he told Ronan.

Ronan's mouth snapped shut.

Niall raised one black brow and rolled up the dripping sleeves of his shirt. On the outside of his left forearm there was a livid red scar, recent and surprising. Ronan gave a shout.

"Oh, this?" Niall said. "I got into a fight with the devil. He was as big as a mountain, but he had the brains of a minnow. Also a knife, so." He grinned. One of his teeth had chipped, possibly in the fight.

Ronan swam to the shore to get a better look. It seemed impossible. No one could mark Niall this way. Niall swatted at him and said, "I'm drying and you're dripping on me."

Ronan dodged each swat, like Niall had taught him to. Niall looked on proudly and started lazily trying to grab for him instead. It was dangerous and fun to dodge his long arms, like all games with Niall, but Ronan was not in the mood for it.

"Tell me what happened," Ronan demanded, as though Niall could make the wound untrue just by saying it. Sometimes he thought things did not start out untrue, but only became untrue by accident because they'd landed in Niall's mouth.

Niall lifted him up again and now shook him so that the water on him spattered everywhere.

"He had a knife made of the West Wind, but luckily for me that is the slowest of the four Winds," Niall said. "And I took a great piece of sky and made it a knife of my own, and I caught him just below the eye, right here." And he tapped just below Ronan's left eye, where the tip of the cheekbone went.

"Why were you fighting?" Ronan said.

"Maybe because I wanted to cut him there," Niall said, "because I wanted to make a mark there." He tapped. "Because he did not have a birthmark there." He tapped. "Like you have a birthmark there." And he tapped the spot again. 

Ronan had never considered his birthmarks and had no idea if Niall was telling the truth. 

Niall threw him over his shoulder and carried him into the house. Aurora said, "He'll catch a cold!" when she saw them. Niall said, "Alright. What are you for, then, if not to nurse him?"

He put Ronan down and picked her up. He kissed her neck and squeezed her in places that made her shriek. 

When he was done, Niall said, "Make sure he takes a bath next time I'm gone," and went to squeeze the water out of the one remaining lizard in his pocket, so he could pin it to some cardboard and tell Declan it was a science experiment. 

Ronan went to the bathroom to examine his birthmark. It turned out to be so faint that he wondered if Niall had only just dreamed it into being, just then, just by talking about it. 

\- 

It became a complicated secret. Complicated because it was stretched thin unnecessarily. Secrets needed no more than two people and yet the events of that afternoon were spread out among several: Ronan and Adam's cohort of ecclesiastical landlords, the various pious women who volunteered at the church office, and a magical forest.

And Robert Parrish. He seemed to have kept his mouth shut. Adam never indicated that Henrietta was treating him any differently, that Boyd at the garage had declared him a social pariah. If it even mattered when the trailer park declared you a pariah. Ronan didn't see why it should. 

He tossed the secret in a corner of his mind and slid into the seat next to Adam in Modernist Lit. There bell rang almost immediately after, and Walworth rose from behind his desk and went to lock the classroom door.

"Lucky, lucky, Mr. Lynch," Walworth said. "Nice to see you showing up today." 

Adam flicked his dusty lashes towards Ronan with something that might have been interest or might have been irritation. He was tabbing and highlighting in his book. He did not use normal tabs, just torn strips of some auto magazine he'd picked up at the garage for free. It made the book look like something that had come out of the garbage bin at the Goodwill, and Ronan told him so.

"The bell just rang," Adam said shortly. "That means pay attention."

Walworth now took the seat to the left of Adam, at the head of one of the large oval tables used in all Aglionby humanities classes. He nodded and said, "Yes, Mr. Parrish, and I'd like you to stop doing your homework as well."

Adam snapped the book shut and sat up straight, looking mortified. Henry Cheng and Logan van Buren, sitting on the other side of Walworth, exchanged delighted glances.

Ronan said, "Maybe if you didn't assign three-hundred pages a night, we wouldn't have this problem."

"To The Lighthouse is only two hundred and twenty-four pages," Walworth noted, adjusting his tie like he found Ronan only a minor bother. "And we begin at page one-ninety-seven. Mr. Parrish, since I'm assuming you've only just read it, you can start us off with the second paragraph. This will hopefully keep you and Mr. Lynch from treating the class like a date at Nino's."

Henry clapped his hands over his mouth. Logan hooted. Mike Dashwood, sitting to Ronan's right, looked uneasy and slowly edged away, like he thought Ronan was a firework and Walworth had just lit the fuse. 

But Adam just picked up his book and flipped to page one-ninety-seven.

"I think it's the one with the Modell's ad," Logan offered.

Adam ignored him. Unlike Gansey, who'd taken Victorian Lit by storm last semester, Adam read perfunctorily, voice carefully even. Ronan could feel the effort that went into suppressing his normal accent. He listened to the voice and not the words -- the words didn't matter. He would scrape a C or D in the class, and even that was a pain. He disliked working for things he didn't need. He rarely had to work for the things he did need. For that matter, neither did Adam these days. 

It irritated Ronan to see him trying at Aglionby, always so desperate and careful. 

Using an X-Acto knife he'd nicked from the science labs that morning, Ronan scratched the shape of the humanities building into the the Harkness table, and then scratched a series of flames around the building. Mike Dashwood made a noise like a strangled cat. Ronan scratched in a stick figure. Above it, he added a M I K E D A S H W

He was halfway through the O when Walworth said, "Enough. Mr. Lynch, since you're paying attention so carefully. How do you think the symbol just referenced advances Woolf's thematic goals?"

Ronan grunted out, "It's a lighthouse."

Henry Cheng practically cackled.

Walworth said, "We know it's a lighthouse, Mr. Lynch. We all heard it was a lighthouse. The very _title_ informs u--"

There was a knock at the classroom door. Walworth sighed, held up a hand, and went to harangue Tad Carruthers for his failure to arrive on time. Over the sound of Tad's protests and desperate pleas to be let into the classroom, Adam hissed, "Did you even read it?"

Ronan was annoyed by his tone. It was not disappointment, but something altogether more superior. 

He might have been able to forgive the disdainful, elegant Adam of his dreams for this. That Adam was the magician, a knowing creature. He came in the brief alert moments at St. Agnes, just as Adam awoke, in the moments when Adam's day held no jobs or studying or plans -- only Ronan, lightly kicking Adam awake and presenting a magician-worthy problem, like Noah or Aurora or Matthew.

He came, too, at the Barns. There he was quieter, more respectful and still. But intoxicatingly pitiless, too. What good was a nearly-awake cow, Ronan? What was the point of waking something if you couldn't give it its own soul? What happened when Ronan Lynch died, what then? What happened if they woke it all up -- all the green and verdant land -- and then Cabeswater disappeared?

Adam was not made for dog-eared secondhand modernist lit, but for great plans and careful balancing. When he forgot this, he became something so removed from Ronan that Ronan could not bear it. 

"Did you even read it?" Adam said again now.

"It's boring," he said. "Why did you read it?"

"It's assigned," Adam said. "This is modernist lit."

"Yeah, well if that's what you're going to study, then good fucking luck leaving the trailer park behind," Ronan said. He stabbed the X-Acto knife into the table in irritation, letting it stand on its blade for a moment. It quivered and fell over, and Mike Dashwood whispered something furiously to the boy sitting next to him.

"Why are you wasting your time with this?" Ronan added. "We should cut tomorrow. You know the book already. You can do the test."

"Attendance is worth forty percent of the grade," Adam said. "So no."

Ronan felt his frustration mount, and yet there was no outlet: just the Harkness Table and cozy parlor decor of the Humanities building, and eleven boys ranging from uncaring to actively eavesdropping. He finished up Mike Dashwood's name. 

"I have something I wanted to show you," he said, low. "At the Barns."

There was always something to show at the Barns. Sometimes Ronan wondered if the world looked so small because he'd come at it from the Barns, from the ever-unfurling carpet of his father's imagination.

When he looked at Adam out of the corner of his eye, Adam was still and resolute, as though he were making great plans in his head. Ronan allowed himself to hope. There was something dangerous inside Adam Parrish, something fiercer and wilder than Adam seemed to realize. It arrested Ronan. Some nights he wondered if he had dreamed it into place.

But all Adam said was, "Walworth already thinks I'm behind. I don't want him to keep thinking that."

Ronan stabbed the knife into the underside of the table. Mike Dashwood jumped in his chair.

Ronan said, "You wanna prove that you read this shit? What's that prove? She spends like six paragraphs describing a leaf!" 

"What did you want her to describe?" Adam said. "Ninjas?"

Walworth had returned and settled down next to Adam. He said, in the bored tones of an announcer, "Mr. Lynch and Mr. Parrish would have preferred to read a book about ninjas." The whole class hooted. Adam was fair enough to go visibly red, so he did.

He did not speak to Ronan for the rest of the class. When they reached the halfway point and were assigned to work in pairs with the person sitting next to them, he politely requested someone else. Walworth commended him on his good sense and assigned him Mike Dashwood. Ronan spent the rest of class ignoring Henry Cheng and adding Henry Cheng figures to the burning humanities building.

"I don't want to be rude," Henry said.

Ronan said, "You're gonna power through it, aren't you, asshole?"

"Everyone thinks you're a sociopath," Henry said. "We have a sociopath problem at this school. I wouldn't even be here if the college admissions statistics weren't so good. Remember Kavinsky? He killed himself with a firework."

"It was a dream," Ronan said, because even if he was a sociopath, he was a truthful one. He kept the truth simple. There was a spot inside him -- once fire, now ashes -- that did not want to complicate, did not want to even approach the topic of Kavinsky. "It was a dream, when he died."

"Wow, that's somehow the creepiest thing you could have said," said Henry.


	2. Chapter 2

Matthew made friends with everyone, and Declan collected all kinds: friends and followers and sycophants and tools. 

Ronan's friend was named Packard, like the car company. Packard had blond-white hair. When asked, he would report that his mother soaked it in lemon juice. Packard seemed to like this process, though to Ronan it sounded painful. 

Packard was his best friend regardless. At school, Packard sat across from Ronan in every class and next to Ronan at lunch, and when they had to select a partner they always looked to each other before everyone else could reject them. No one else wanted to partner with Ronan. By fourth grade no one was napping anymore, but everyone remembered naptime with Ronan in the class, how he'd wake with pockets stuffed full of millipedes and mice and eyeballs and flowers and strange white scaly things with many beaks, fluffy horror bundles that skittered along the classroom floor and made the other children scream. 

Packard did not remember because he hadn't been there. He'd only just moved to Virginia from Dallas, Texas, after a messy divorce left his mother a free and wealthy woman with nothing to do but pour lemon juice on her son.

Niall was in and out of the Barns that year with little warning. The first few times Packard came, Niall was not there. They sat at the kitchen table with cookies and milk and coloring books. It was boring, but it kept Packard near the telephone in case his mother called, which she did often. It also suited Packard. He did not like to go outside. He did not like cold, or heat, or sun or shade. He disliked running and seemed undecided on the merits of play in general. He thought the pond looked too deep, and the barns too dark. He missed his gated development back in Dallas, Texas, with its air-conditioned indoor tennis courts and three-foot kiddie swimming pool and the network of highways that had comfortingly enveloped the whole area. Virginia roads could be darker and wilder and the roads near the Barns were the wildest yet, plum trees and daffodils and bluebells and red raspberries growing freely. Ronan loved it fiercely and tried to show Packard. Packard cried at the dark bends between the trees, and complained of allergies. 

So they colored. Ronan colored his houses black and his sky maroon and his people green. Packard colored them all the right colors. One day, just as Ronan finished a blue dog and passed Packard the crayon so that he could do his sky, Niall walked in. He walked in the way he always did, like he'd only just stepped out, and he walked straight up to Aurora and pulled her to him, and then pulled them both to the den and locked the door.

Packard looked alarmed, so Ronan said, "That's my father. Excuse me," and went to bother the door handle. He rattled it expectantly, so that Niall would know this kind of entrance was not acceptable. 

"Go away, little hurricane," Niall said. "I'll give you your presents later."

Ronan rattled harder.

"It'll just be a minute," Niall said, sounding annoyed.

"A minute?" said Aurora. 

"I've been away and you haven't seen me at all. Be glad you get a minute," Niall teased. Then, "Ronan, don't make me get a massive Ronan-swatter."

"A Ronan-swatter?" said Ronan. 

"It's a fly-swatter," said Niall. "But it's sized especially for Ronans. I'll get it, and then I'll give it to Declan."

This was probably an idle threat, but Ronan reflected that Niall could certainly carry it out if he wanted to. Niall could do anything. Ronan went back to the kitchen. Packard sat there, looking shocked. Ronan realized that of course Packard's parents no longer grabbed each other and vanished into rooms together. He regarded Packard pityingly. Packard said, "A Ronan swatter?"

Ronan said, "He can make one. Probably."

Ronan was always telling Packard about the things Niall could do, and offering to show Packard the many wonders of the Barns, not just the mice and millipedes and eyeballs but the nice things, like the singing goldfish in Matthew's room and the jack-o-lanterns left over from Halloween that still told jokes. Packard insisted that he didn't believe any of it. Ronan reasoned that he must believe it a little, or else he would not be so afraid to leave the kitchen.

They colored for several minutes more before Niall came back in. His hair was messy and he was doing up the zipper on his jeans. Ronan was briefly displeased. He had wanted Packard to see a Niall displayed to best effect. Niall was tall and handsome and worked in antiquities, and Packard's father was -- to hear Packard's mother speak of it -- short and gimlet-eyed and worked in adultery. 

"Who is this?" Niall said, laying a welcoming hand on Packard's hair. "My god. Such hair. Like Matthew's! Is he ours?"

"No," Packard said, wriggling away and looking frightened. "I'm my mother's."

This was true. He was legally his mother's in the divorce. Ronan introduced Packard and explained this.

"Divorce," was all Niall said, making a face. Then he came around to Ronan's chair and lifted Ronan right out of it easily, even though Ronan had gained four pounds and an inch while he'd been gone. He tossed Ronan in the air and Ronan screamed with delight. Packard looked on, astounded.

"Well, are you going to color all day, Packard?" Niall said, still tossing Ronan.

"Ye-es," Packard said, like he was speaking to a lunatic. Ronan was riled. Packard, who did not even have a father anymore, should know better than to speak to Ronan's father that way.

"All he wants to do is color," Ronan complained. "He won't go out. He doesn't want to meet the fish. And his hair is only that color because his mom puts lemons in it."

"Lemons?" said Niall. "Well, why not come with us, Packard, and we'll pick some lemons and make her a present of them?" 

Packard bit his lip, as though he received the invitation with some trepidation. Ronan thought this was rude. As Aurora trailed back in, looking disheveled and leading Matthew by the hand, Ronan said, "We'll get the lemons ourselves. We don't need him."

Niall put Ronan down and patted Matthew's head and picked Ronan back up. He passed his hands through Ronan's dark hair, thicker and wilder than his own. 

Packard said, somewhat stupidly, "You have lemons?"

"We have everything," Ronan said, just as Niall said, "I have everything." 

Ronan hugged him. He liked it when they thought the same thoughts.

"Come along, Packard," said Niall. He carried Ronan out of the room and down the hall, through the rear mudroom and across the yard to the shed just beyond the barn. Surprisingly, Packard followed. 

Niall, still holding Ronan, kicked the door in. Ronan laughed, but closed his eyes. The light inside the shed was blinding, and Niall kept it so hot that no one ever had any desire to visit while Niall was gone. It was a headache to walk in, too. The inside was so much bigger than the outside that your brain had to adjust, and of course for a moment it couldn't, and the rest of the time the shed was fine, but in that moment it could be terrifying.

Packard walked in and began to cry.

Niall told him the same thing he told all of them. "Don't be a baby," he said straightforwardly. Then he put Ronan down and strode nonchalantly through the rows and rows of lemon and orange trees. The shed was more of a greenhouse on the inside. Ronan followed him and hoped he would make the turn-off to the fountain with the woman who held the white rabbit. He did. 

Niall and Ronan regarded her for a moment, Packard entirely forgotten. 

"That," Niall informed Ronan, "is Alice."

"I know," Ronan said. "You told me."

Alice was made of something shiny like pennies, so Ronan could not tell the colors of her. He assumed she was a blonde because Alice ought to be. She looked halfway woman and halfway little girl. She had a small pockmark below her eye that might have been a birthmark, and by now Ronan assumed Niall had put it there because Ronan had one as well. Niall had never told him otherwise. 

"The trouble with Alice," Niall said thoughtfully, "Is that Alice was too real. She was the only real and true person in all Wonderland. All the rest were her creations. Now, if you were Alice, would you not want to meet a real person like you?"

"Yes," Ronan said promptly, because the way Niall had phrased it suggested that the answer was yes. 

"I wouldn't," Niall said. "Real people are no good."

Before Ronan could think on this too deeply, there was a wail. Packard. They regarded eachother for a moment, Niall looking annoyed, Ronan looking ashamed for having brought someone like Packard into their midst. He was only now realizing that Packard offered very little. They hurried back to the entrance.

Packard was covered in lemons. They were crawling on him. Niall lifted one off of Packard's shaking shoulders and showed Ronan its multitude of spindly legs. 

"That was the wrong tree," Niall told Packard. "You should have asked me and I would have shown you the right ones. These over here -- they'll turn your hair green."

In fact, it was already happening. Some had reached Packard's head and were leaving trails of juice behind. The result was more teal than pure green.

"You should have asked," Niall said again. He looked down at Ronan and frowned. Packard was sobbing like he might sob up his lungs, his organs, his stomach, all his insides.

Ronan was embarrassed. 

-

On Saturday, Ronan drove to St. Agnes. He had a packet of note tabs in the glove compartment. Noah had tested them on one of Gansey's history textbooks. They highlighted relevant quotes and added notes when you tabbed a page. Noah had then stuck some to the magazines at the gas station, marveling at the way the tabs filled out the _People_ crossword and left bold black lines through strictly inaccurate information about the Kardashians. Ronan figured Adam would use them long enough to realize they'd help him cheat on his tests, then throw them out.

Adam was not home. 

Ronan's skin felt tight and irritating. He let himself out of the apartment and stomped down to the church office. Mrs. Ramirez looked at him warily as he approached. 

"He isn't supposed to have work for another two hours," Ronan said. "Where is he? Did you see where he went?" 

"No," she said. She did not need to ask who Ronan was talking about. She looked hurriedly at her computer screen and began to click frantically. Behind her, there was a Virgin Mary in a mirrored frame. The mirrored frame revealed a very intense Freecell game. 

"Red queen to black king," Ronan said, as he turned away. "Fucking obviously." 

The Hondayota pulled into the parking lot just as Ronan came out of the office. Adam climbed out and pulled a battered laundry sack out after him. He wore a ratty t-shirt and thin drawstring pajama pants, and with the autumn chill his skin was fast losing its freckles and gaining goosebumps. 

"They don't let you use the washing machines here?" Ronan said, startling Adam and making him almost drop the sack. "Where they wash, like, the cassocks and shit?"

"They don't really talk to me here except to get the rent," Adam said. "Actually, these days they're talking to me even less."

It was the new secret, stretching very very thin. Ronan thought about saying it, but found the words sticking in his throat. At night he dreamt sometimes of the mask. It was both something that would be and had been. Ronan's dreams of it had only begun after the night Adam had lost his hearing, after the first night Ronan had thrown a punch at Adam's father. Some nights he felt as though he'd fixed the mask to Adam's face then, as though after that Adam's skin was laid over something dark and sharp and evil that Ronan had carelessly put there. 

He worried the bands on his wrists with his teeth. Adam saw this but did not comment. Adam rarely commented on what Ronan did. Ronan could not tell if he liked this or if it left him dissatisfied, that every wild word Adam could say instead remained buried under his tongue.

Now he followed Adam up to his apartment, picking the sack of laundry out of Adam's hands. Ronan threw the sack on the bed as they went in, then sprawled on the floor and pulled out the note tabs, placing them deliberately on a pile of schoolbooks.

Adam watched him do it. Ronan feared he would say nothing. Ronan half-hoped he would say nothing.

"Thanks," Adam said.

He pulled out his laundry and began to sort it. It was a blur of secondhand t-shirts and faded boxers and camo cargo pants with mysterious holes above the pockets. It all went carelessly into one plastic bin or another. His Aglionby sweater hung carefully on a hanger and peg in the corner, too precious to take to the laundromat. 

"I don't know what it means that Noah's going," Adam said. "It isn't-- it isn't tied to the ley line, I don't think. The line has more power than it's had in a while, with no one around to drain Cabeswater. And me to fix it."

There were nights when Adam disappeared entirely, and only arrived at the head of a gang of grateful ghosts. Ronan, waiting in St. Agnes, would watch him gently close the door in their faces and collapse into bed for the twenty minutes before his next shift at work. 

"You'll think of something, Parrish," Ronan said. 

"I don't know," Adam said. "You can do a lot. But I don't know if I can do anything that's opposed to Cabeswater. Anything that would be unnatural."

Adam let that thought sit and folded his work coveralls with quick, competent movements. Unnatural. Ghosts could be unnatural. And dreamers. And Cabeswater itself didn't seem natural some days. Ronan did not like to think in these terms, in _natural_ versus _unnatural_. He preferred _worthless_ versus _magic_.

"Unnatural? You're half-forest," he said. "What the fuck are you if not that?"

Adam made a noncommittal sound. He was a busy, faded thing, a magician with no time for magic. His long-fingered hands sorted efficiently, beautiful tools turned to mundane use. To avoid looking at them, Ronan picked up two greying socks and tugged them into knots.

"I'd throw these in the garbage if I were you," he said.

"If you were me, you'd only have enough pairs to get you through the week," Adam said, "so no, you wouldn't."

Ronan balled them up and threw them at a plastic bin, the movement forceful and violent. They bounced off and rolled into a corner. Adam picked them up fluidly just as Ronan's phone began to buzz.

Ronan failed to pick it up. As of this morning, he had two messages from Declan. He didn't know what they said. He didn't care. Adam used to pick up when Declan called, and call Declan back when necessary, but Adam seemed less and less inclined to do this and Ronan less and less inclined to have him do it. Gansey handled all communications now, via his own phone. 

"Gansey's in D.C.," Ronan said, thinking aloud.

"I know," Adam said. It was another of Mrs. Gansey's events and would have benefited Adam, but Gansey had not invited him this time. Adam did not indicate that this bothered him. His dusty lashes fluttered, as though he were blinking something out of his eye. Ronan tracked the movement hungrily. 

"Washington's low comedy at this point," Ronan said. 

"Sure," Adam said, picking up the last pair of ragged jeans and scrutinizing them for a moment before balling them away in a bin.

"An ass and elephant walk," Ronan said.

"I can't tell if that's disgusting or a clever pun," said Adam.

"Probably both," Ronan said. "I'm a gift." 

He was pleased when Adam didn't say anything to the contrary, and then blackly angry that he could be pleased. He snapped his wristbands and tried to think of something to make the anger less irritating and more _interesting_. He felt as though he knew Adam. Adam could know him. Yet conversations did not run right. Ronan did not run right, but then that was old news. He thought again of taking Adam to the Barns, to some labyrinthine corner they had not yet visited. He had all the property at his disposal now, and some of it was going so wild and raw that to see it anew would be its own adventure. Showing Adam the newest parts of himself.

Adam stretched out on the bed, kicking off his shoes and closing his eyes.

"Dude, what the fuck?" Ronan said. "You have a guest."

Adam's voice, when it came, was muffled by the pillow and yet still Henrietta through and through. 

"Tell my guest I slept three hours last night," he said. "And two the night before that. And I'll get maybe one hour tonight."

He curled into himself, not covering himself with his cheap sheets but merely clutching them. Chainsaw had ripped his cheap Wal-Mart comforter to shreds a few weeks ago. Adam had said very evenly that he had enough money coming this month to get a new one, like it didn't matter, but to see him like this Ronan felt that it did. Adam's skin was still goosebumped, and when he shifted his t-shirt rode up and revealed the vee at the base of his abdomen, pointing down below his boxers and drawstring pants. Ronan felt his blood go wild, potent. 

He stood. 

"You're a lot of fucking fun, Parrish," he said. 

Adam said something that was too muffled to make out, voice already heavy with sleep. Ronan turned to go.

"Ronan," Adam said again, a little clearer now.

Ronan thought of that vee at the base of his abdomen, and the bed with its ripped sheets. It was ugly and marvelous all at once. Ronan felt known, and strangely knowledgeable. He wondered if Cabeswater had spread roots into Adam that he could trace somehow, if beneath Adam's skin there was a map he could follow.

Adam said, slow and even, "What I was saying about Noah. It -- doing something for your mom and Matthew should be easier. They're raw. New. Too new, I think. I think that's the real problem. We don't need to open Cabeswater for them. They need the kind of magic that lets you change and get worn. Like the Apple of Knowledge."

Ronan stared at him. For the first time, Adam turned his head on the pillow looked at him directly, dusty lashes and tired blue eyes.

"I think it's living above a church that gave me the idea," he admitted. "But it makes sense, and Cabeswater agrees with me. That's all a soul is: the thing that isn't innocent and isn't pure, but is _you_. The thing that can change and grow and learn. A will. So. I wanted you to know that. That's what you have to make. Something that'll give them that--"

"How the fuck am I supposed to do that?" Ronan said. Dreaming was not automatic. Creation took failure, distortion, ignition, and outburst.

"That's your specialty, not mine," Adam said. "I just want you to know. They won't be the same, when we're through."

"What does that mean?" Ronan demanded. This was not the plan. He wanted to open the door to Cabeswater. He wanted to keep them the same, yet give them independent life. It seemed impossible, but Adam was the magician. It was his job to make the impossible possible.

"Do you want them to stay the same?" Adam asked, instead of giving him a straight answer. 

Adam's gaze held his, still and challenging. Then he looked away, closing his eyes again.

"Think about it," he said, and slept. 

-

The earliest memory Ronan had was not of Niall but of Declan, a tousle-haired Declan who was not Declan at all, just something skinny and tall that climbed the drainpipe and rattled the window and showed off the way he could monkey up to the roof of the house, to sit at the crossroad of the stars. 

That was at night. In the mornings, Declan would be the first outside and would come to breakfast with his hair lustrous and shimmering, dusted with whatever it was that settled on the morning glories and the blue dream-flowers. To Ronan, Declan was second only to Niall. Like Niall, Declan wore the Barns very easily back then.

One morning, when Aurora was preoccupied with the baby, Niall locked himself in his office to do some dreaming work, which was to say not work at all. Ronan stood outside with the cows and stomped and stomped his feet in a pattern that he thought was like music. It was not like music; it was like noise.

"What fresh devil did I piss on to get a son with no rhythm?" Niall complained from inside the office. "I can't sleep to that."

Ronan continued to stomp. The cows began to low in time, or not quite in time, because there was no time to Ronan's movements.

"I've put six yellow dogs in the attic, Ronan," Niall said. 

Ronan did not want six yellow dogs. He continued to stomp.

"I'll give you a tart with live ferrets in it if you go away, Ronan," Niall said.

Ronan did want a tart with ferrets, as he was in a ferret phase, but he wanted Niall more. He continued to stomp. 

He heard Niall sigh. Niall said, "Ronan, I think Declan's going all the way to the bridge without you."

A serious accusation. Declan could not be allowed to do this. Declan could not go to the bridge without him, nor could he follow the stream without him. Declan should not play by the pond without him, or climb the plum trees without him. Declan must not sit on the fence by the pasture without him, and could never be permitted to dally near the cherry orchard without him.

It was not that Declan had lost the right to be alone, but merely that Ronan did not want him to be. Monkey-climbing Declan with the dew in his hair was better than six yellow dogs, better even than a tart with ferrets in it.

Ronan started for the bridge, near the farthest points of the property. The grasses on the way grew wild and tall and and hid golden crickets. These politely hopped aside to give Ronan space. The air was alive with wonderful discordant noise -- bullfrogs and cicadas and chattering birds, everything living and out of season because the Barns did not care about seasons. Ronan followed the stream, pausing to pick up several pastel-colored beetles and stuff them into his pockets to show Declan. Declan liked insects and had just bought his own anthill, a thing that seemed wondrous to Ronan because as far he knew Niall had never made it, had never even touched it. 

The bridge was some rough-hewn planks thrown picturesquely across the stream. It was not a fast or a deep stream, so these planks were unnecessary. Niall had only been so bored one day that he'd promised that Ronan a red-headed carpenter with a peg-leg would come visit. The carpenter had come, red hair and all, peg-leg and all. He had installed the bridge for them. When Niall wanted people to do things for him, he seemed to produce them from the air.

For Ronan's part, he only wanted Declan. But Declan would not be produced; he was not by the bridge. By this time Ronan's legs were too tired to start back in the direction of the house, and the beetles were crawling down his shins and irritating his skin, and so he did the only thing that made sense. He sat on the bridge and began to cry. 

He was not crying long when he saw the tall-skinny figure picking its way through the grass. Declan. By the time Declan made it to the bridge Ronan was merely sniffling, but he was still affronted.

"You weren't here!" he told Declan.

"Didn't know I had to be," Declan said.

"Dad said," Ronan said. "Dad said you were."

That settled it. If Niall said it, then Declan ought to have done it. Declan would not concede the point; he only shrugged and sat down next to Ronan. He had a camera he'd taken from Niall's bedroom. Whatever it photographed came out much older in the snapshots, old and ghostly and with the skin rotting off. Niall had not yet noticed it was even missing.

"Just because he says things doesn't matter," Declan said. "He lies. A lot." 

Ronan disliked this pronouncement, so he threw the remaining beetles in the stream. They began to dive. They could swim. Ronan was disappointed.

"Look, Declan," he said, "Look at them." The beetles made rainbow arcs of light in the water, beautiful and nonsensical, like everything Niall made. 

"It's thunderstorming," was what Declan said in response. "Outside here. In the rest of Virginia. The radio told me."

Ronan did not care for this information. It almost never thunderstormed at the Barns. Niall had once explained that he'd fought all the thunderstorms and embarrassed them so badly that by now they knew not to come visit without his express permission. 

"Can I show you something?" Declan asked.

Ronan nodded. Declan was not as good at finding interesting things as Niall was, but he was still pretty good.

"Ferrets?" Ronan asked, as Declan led him across the bridge to the place where the stream met the forest.

"No," Declan said.

Ronan was disappointed again. He kicked a rock as he passed it, upending it entirely. Small silver salamanders darted out, running frantically for the stream. Ronan felt heady and powerful, like he could have anything he wanted, like he could go to heaven right now and make demands of God.

"Are there ferrets in heaven?" Ronan asked. Father Tom at St. Agatha's had spent twenty-seven minutes discussing heaven yesterday, but he had not mentioned ferrets, so the sermon had struck Ronan as somewhat incomplete.

"I don't know," Declan said. "God could probably turn into a ferret if He wanted to."

Ronan was impressed. The ability to change oneself. Not even Niall could do that.

Before long they came to the very furthest edge of the Barns. The long grass tumbled right into a series of straight white-bark trees. These grew so close together that they looked like bars on a window. Declan was growing thin enough to squeeze through, but Ronan was smaller and fatter and had to be pulled.

In a clearing between the trees, there was a leafy turnip patch. This was Ronan's third disappointment of the day. They had a turnip patch closer to the house, and it was by far the most boring thing on the property, the domain of Aurora in her white sun hat and boring baby Matthew toddling around in his blue baby coveralls. Ronan did not see why they needed to hide a second turnip patch out here. The hiding place was wasted.

But Declan kneeled at the edge of the patch and put both hands on a curiously spiny stem and tugged and tugged, and instead of a turnip he produced a lock of golden hair, and then a white forehead, and then a slack face with bow lips very like Aurora's. And then another. And then another. Some were connected to shoulders and bodies that pointed down into the earth. Some were old and the flesh had peeled away in one great layer and so they were connected to nothing, just a caravan of hairy skulls with strips of missing skin sliding off. Most still had eyes, and sometimes the eyes blinked vacantly, as though they had been sleeping and not falling to pieces.

"He lies," Declan said furiously, piling up the evidence. "Ronan, look! He lies all the time! You're not like him! Don't be like him!"

Ronan stared at the great pyramid of heads and leaves and flesh. He was blank inside. His heart was pounding.

"Remember when Matthew came? Remember why you brought Matthew?" Declan said. "Remember what made you do it? Don't be like him!"

Ronan's heart pounded so hard that it drove out all the heavy, living sounds, and it drove out his eyes and his brain and when it finally stopped pounding he had run so hard that his legs were on fire. He was all the way back by the pasture near the house. He found the greatest of the plum trees and climbed up into it. When, Niall found him he was still crying. 

"Why did Matthew come?" Ronan asked. "Why did Matthew come?"

In the time he had been crying, he had decided that boring, fat little Matthew was preferable to Declan with his skull pile. This must have been why the question about Matthew stuck in his mind.

"Lord, I don't know," Niall said. "Don't you know? I suppose to remind me of something. I don't know."

His broad, strong arms pulled Ronan down easily. Ronan wanted to tell him what Declan had done, but couldn't. 

It was a sick little secret at the edge of his heart, and at the core of Declan's. Niall never learned about it.

\- 

Sunday after mass Ronan drove Matthew to Cabeswater. It was just the two of them this week. Declan was at Georgetown, cramming for exams with a whole new pool of admirers, larger and even less interesting than the pool at Aglionby.

Matthew kept lowering his window. Ronan kept telling him to stop. Matthew kept forgetting and doing it anyway. His shaggy blond head hung out of the car, interested in everything even though he'd seen it all a million times before.

"That's not fucking safe and you know it," Ronan said.

"Oh. Okay," Matthew said. He pulled his head in, and let the window roll up, and smiled at Ronan, and promptly lowered the window again.

"Do you think the Garden of Eden was on a ley line?" Matthew said.

"Sure," Ronan said. His hands tightened on the wheel. His conversation with Adam replayed itself. Matthew's question felt like time repeating.

"Declan said it can't have been because it's not magic, but divinity," Matthew said.

"What the fuck does Declan know about magic or divinity?" snapped Ronan.

"Oh. Right. Nothing."

Ronan hoped he wouldn't ask again.

He didn't. Instead he asked, "Do you think crickets say, 'ripe, ripe' to tell us when the fruit is ready to eat?" 

"Sure," Ronan said gratefully. This was normal Matthew. This was the solid logic that earned glowing behavioral reports from housemasters who adored him, and blocky red C-minuses from teachers who saw him as something of a lost cause. Matthew tended to look at the C-minuses and say, "Oh," and promptly forget about them. He held no grudges. His teachers loved him, too. When they graded him a C-minus, they only really hurt themselves.

"Declan said it was a mating call," Matthew said now. "But it can't be a mating call because then they're saying 'ripe, ripe' about themselves. Like they're the fruit. Which means they'll rot. Who would want to be with someone that was only going to rot? I wouldn't."

They reached the field before the forest and Ronan stopped the car. Matthew bounded ahead joyfully, aware that Aurora was only a few moments away. Ronan kept up with him out of guarded care. There was a mud-spattered Ford parked in the field, heralding a new visitor.

But when they reached the forest it was only Blue. She sat with her knees pulled up, arms draped loosely around them like a reinforced wall. Her head was not quite turned to Aurora, but Aurora was talking to her anyway. Aurora never turned away a visitor. She did not seem to have that ability.

"Hey," Blue said, as Ronan approached. " I thought I'd come here. I mean, Gansey's in D.C., and..."

She trailed off and picked at the hem of her dress, a garment made largely of paper clips and hope. She frowned. Both she and Ronan understood the strangeness of Blue coming here without the others. Ronan was the Greywaren and Adam the magician and Gansey was Gansey, and even Noah had a claim to this place, since he'd died here. But without them, Blue Sargent was a loose end and knew it. Because she was like Ronan, she nonetheless refused to justify her presence in any way.

Ronan hugged his mother and then sat next to Blue on the grass. They formed two islands. The contained, joyful island of Matthew and Aurora. And the darker, harder island of Ronan and Blue. Matthew and Aurora filled their island up with chattering. Ronan and Blue mostly sat in silence.

Ronan did not want to speak to anything but Cabeswater at the moment. Cabeswater, which sent forth visions and horrors and cryptic messages in the tapwater. It was its own kind of nightmare, this forest. No wonder it loved Ronan. 

Ronan wanted to know if it had made something for him, if it had taken Adam Parrish -- withered with work, carefully shedding pieces of himself like an autumn tree -- and forced him into spring. Adam had cracked apart and come back with something inside him reborn, bursting into leaf. It paralyzed Ronan. On good nights he dreamt that Adam's spine was a green stem, and his eyes, when he opened them, were orchids in bloom, and his hands reached out, miracles of resurrection.

 _Is it you?_ Ronan wanted to ask. Had it been Cabeswater, molding Adam into something Ronan could love? And if it was Cabeswater, then wasn't it Ronan as well? The forest was at the mercy of all dreamers. Niall had drained it for years in order to populate the Barns, drained the ley line to create his own spot of eternal summer vitality. 

Was it right?

Magic was there to be used. It was Ronan's birthright to use it. But he was not quite Niall and not quite Kavinsky. Was he better, or worse? Was it worse if he used the forest like this, turned it to the business of crafting his own Aurora? And what happened when Adam seemed to fight it, when instead of the magician, the satisfied, powerful creature Ronan dreamed for him, he chose fading and work? 

Ronan snapped his bands against his wrists, leaving red welts on the skin. He felt black and sick. He and Adam were something he had no words for. This was not Gansey-and-Blue, guiltily united. This was something without guilt, something reckless and demanding, and somehow that made it worse.

"Can I tell you something?" Blue said suddenly.

Ronan assumed she would no matter what, so he said nothing. He massaged his temple and closed his eyes. He did not want to think about Blue. He was just starting to think about himself. 

"I'm going to kill my true love," Blue said. "Everyone says so. My mother, Calla, even Persephone used to say it. It's going to happen."

The words came out of her so plainly that it took Ronan a moment to process what she had said. He realized that she was thinking of Gansey when she said it, but he could not connect this to Gansey. He felt as though she'd said it because the forest made her. Time aligned itself strangely in Cabeswater. Perhaps when Ronan worried, Blue worried, and their fears twisted together on the same vine of time. 

"What would you do, if it were you?" she asked Ronan. "If you'd grown up your whole life with people telling you something like that?"

Ronan did not have an answer for her. True love was nothing true. If people had true loves, then what did that make Niall, who'd crafted himself a woman? Had he disliked the woman Fate had arranged for him? What did that make Ronan? 

"Would you go away?" Blue prompted. "Wouldn't it be -- I don't know. Braver? To leave him and not hurt him? Assuming you could? If you were fated to kill the person you loved--"

"I wouldn't be able to endure myself," Ronan said.

It was the truth.

The trees above them dropped rotting apples that had not been there a moment before. They had a sick perfume. Ronan thought they were Blue's fault. Her face was still and her eyes were red.

"But what would you _do_?" she demanded, voice cracking.

"I told you," Ronan said. 

He had no further answers for her. He wondered what happened if you changed or killed something in order to make it something you could love. And if something you loved needed killing, something precious and uncomplicated and perfectly ordered, as natural and sweet as plums on the vine, or the first people in the Garden. He looked at Aurora and Matthew in their chattering island. He wondered about waking them up, freeing them, changing them. Giving them a will. He looked at the apples in the grass and at his own forearms, striped with bands like viper markings.


	3. Chapter 3

Ronan had grown up around Henrietta, but was not from there. To be from the Barns was to be something else entirely. If Henrietta was the damp, ugly earth, then the Lynches lived on the moon, forever revolving about the area, forever removed.

He grew very proud of it. When Ronan buzzed his hair short the first time, Niall cursed to see it and said he'd ruined it and that he looked like a townie. Ronan cursed at that and said, "Do I _look_ like my teeth are rotting out of my head?"

Then Niall cursed because he'd cursed and caught him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him in for a tackle.

Niall was powerful, physical, and his boys were too. If Niall forced you to fight it was as good as an embrace. Ronan knew vaguely that this meant the Lynches spoke a different language from the rest of the world, an inverted mirror-tongue. He did not really understand it. Niall was home more often now and would sometimes pick Ronan up at Aglionby for the weekend -- only Declan was old enough to be driving -- and the other boys would stare, perplexed, to see this vigorous, large man with his coarse hands, this farmer-musician, and Ronan shouting for him and punching him on the arm.

Ronan adored it. 

He felt as though the world was finally beginning to make sense. Niall, who had been so frightening to Packard and the other children, to stupid children, was merely curious and cool to the ninth-graders at Aglionby. Aglionby boys did not know the long history of Ronan at St. Agatha's. They did not yet know each other. Even after the first eight months, of school they milled about like loose atomic particles, bouncing off of each other and attracting and locking into loose orbits. Over the course of the school year, Ronan acquired a certain notoriety for being interesting, being easy to pick out. It was the first time Ronan had experienced mostly-positive notoriety.

There was some negative. He'd punched Dylan Stuckey in March because Stuckey had said Ronan was just a local. But most boys thought this was insulting enough to have merited a punch.

And Stuckey was the exception. Many of other boys recognized Ronan clumsily, clapped his buzzed head when they walked into the classroom. Carruthers. Van Buren. Skov. Swan. They were not at first names yet and Ronan did not know when they would be. They were not quite like him. Their wealth was a cool spring rain, something expected and natural. Ronan's family and money seemed raw and recent and exciting, a thunder inside the head. He could not fake the normalcy like Declan could; he could only let them admire the wildness of his background, as though it were something exotic. It was the right degree of exotic. He was no different than the children of rockstars.

Niall seemed gratified that he had friends.

"About time, Ronan," he said casually, as they sorted feed receipts in the office one day. Ronan gave him a smile and did not let on that his stomach was dropping. He hadn't known that Niall had noticed the lack of friends. He hadn't known that Niall noticed Aglionby boys at all, never mind that they couldn't help but notice Niall.

"They like your car," Ronan told him. 

Ronan liked that they liked it. The aggressive, shark-nosed styling was so true to Niall that it was as good as their agreeing to like Niall himself. And when the boys at school spoke cars, they for once spoke the same language as Ronan.

"They'd be prissy little shits not to," Niall said now.

"Carruthers says his dad has the Delfino Feroce prototype, but nobody's ever seen it," Ronan said. 

"Sounds unlikely," Niall agreed, still squinting at the receipts.

"They've seen your car," Ronan said.

"Obviously," said Niall.

Ronan hesitated. He stared at the faded print over Niall's shoulder, of tousle-haired Irish children on an Irish pier, many years ago when the world had been perhaps more Irish.

"I think I'd like to take them out in it," he said. "You know. When I can drive it."

Niall said, "You can drive it now, Ronan." He grinned. 

Ronan felt something painful and wonderful inside him clutch with joy, like hands wrapped around his spine. Niall leaned forward over the receipts. His eyes were as clear and blue as Ronan's, his hair as black, and his features as heavy and savage. Ronan loved him. Ronan loved looking like him.

"But I'm not going to help you do it, Ronan," Niall whispered, close. "You can do it yourself."

A challenge. The hands around Ronan's spine gripped harder, snapped. Ronan felt as though his bones were light and broken. He felt humiliated.

"Don't be a baby, Ronan," Niall said, leaning back again. "You know how this works."

This was the trouble with a father that was thunder and not light spring rain. Ronan wanted to scream. He stood and barged out of the office, and heard Niall begin to hum something in response. Ronan wanted to break something. He beat along the fence posts near the pasture. Aurora, sitting in the tall grass by the house steps with Matthew, said, "Ronan, what is it?" She drifted to her feet, looking alarmed.

Ronan said, "It doesn't matter. He won't give it to me."

She settled back in. If Niall would not give it, then Ronan would not have it. 

But that night Ronan dreamed himself older, dreamed himself cooler. Dreamed a Ronan like Declan, with his late August birthday and his early driver's license. In the morning, there it was, perfect in every way except that the Ronan of the picture had a tooth chipped in a fight. Ronan threw the driver's license at Niall when he came down for breakfast and Niall, laughing, threw him the car keys.

He was told to come back before midnight, or else not come back at all until he'd crashed and killed himself.

"Because I won't want to see you alive if you come back after then," Niall said. He speared a sausage and said, teasingly, to Aurora, "I didn't tell you to overcook it and yet here you are, exceeding expectations." 

Ronan left them to it. He felt free and powerful. He drove to the dormitories and Van Buren piled in, and Carruthers, and Skov and Swan and even Stuckey. The BMW was more than a car; it was a mobile war zone. Stuckey had the face book for Aglionby's sister school and he and Swan thumbed through it, allotting a number out of some complex rating system to every face. Carruthers said, "I don't believe your dad just gave you the keys."

Ronan said, "Believe it." There was nothing else to say. Niall was a challenging sort, but that did not make him any less Ronan's father, and Ronan had no desire to labor over something so precious with someone like Carruthers.

"Let's get food," said van Buren.

"Let's get drinks," Ronan said. He flicked up a hand and revealed the driver's license. The birthdate on it marked him somewhere near ancient. Skov and Swan both reached for it at the same time, hooting and cheering. It was like Ronan had produced true divinity.

He pulled up near a store in town, feeling as though he were true divinity. The savage and heavy aspects of Niall seemed to finally be settling around him, around his shoulders, comforting, powerful. He piled everything he could into his cart, everything he wanted and even some things he didn't particularly care for, just because he could. The keys in his pocket felt more marvelous than the money, but there was a lot of money too. Niall always made sure he had money.

The only damper on the day was the checkout. There were two cashiers. One had a line five people thick. The other had just one person, standing there for what seemed to have been some time. Ronan was caught by the sight of him, but could not figure out why. He was near Ronan's age and nearly as tall, but far more faded-looking. He reminded Ronan of the dusty boys who, like him, lived outside of town. Aside from that they were nothing like him. He used to see them when Niall was gone, swinging their legs in the back of their fathers' pickups, riding next to shotguns or empty oil cans and smiling. He'd hated those boys. So much cheerful dirt. There was a hole in this one's ratty shirt, near the collar. His shoes looked like they smelled. 

But there was a stillness to him that was unusual. Ronan thought it was the stillness, more than anything else, that made him someone Ronan wanted to keep looking at. No boy Ronan knew was so still.

"Please," the boy was saying, holding something out to the cashier. "Could you try it one more time? I just-- she wouldn't have given it to me. I don't think she'd have even sent me it if it didn't have any money." 

His voice twanged. The spell broke. He was just a local. Feeling volatile, powerful, and explosive, Ronan shoved the local's things aside and dumped his basket on the belt before the cashier could answer. 

"Make it quick. I'm in a hurry," he told them both, and he made sure to grin the way Niall did, savage and heavy, the grin that was really a challenge.

The boy looked humiliated. Ronan did not bother to act sorry, just stared pointedly at the hole near the boy's collar. Then he was all rung up and stepped out to meet Carruthers and Skov and Swan and the others -- his friends.

For now. Richard Gansey III would not arrive at Aglionby until the 10th grade. Adam wouldn't come until after that, not until Niall was already gone. Ronan would recognize him, would look at all that elegant stillness with the thunder striking louder than ever in his head. 

He hated Adam Parrish fiercely. Adam came into Ronan's life an even sorrier figure than before, more careful and more tired, more holes in his clothing. But Ronan by then had a hole in his heart, and it was like a sick joke, to think that when he'd been whole and victorious he had been too good to pause for Adam Parrish. Now Adam Parrish sat there quiet and derisive and did not want a pause anyway.

"So he's from D.C. Where are you from?" Adam would ask him, polite, accent carefully muted.

"What do you care? I'm sure as fuck not from a trailer park," Ronan would say.

Gansey would become furious and contrite all at once, damage control mode Gansey, commanding Ronan to apologize. 

Adam would become even more still than before. He would seem to know right away that this Ronan was reduced, faulty. He would seem to say that Ronan had always been that way, and just hadn't noticed.

-

Monday morning, Ronan woke up early, but feeling as though he'd slept the usual amount, slept late. A good sign. He had a heavy coverlet that had not been there before. It was a plain navy blue, no-frills. He kicked his phone off the bed (one missed call from Declan) and reflected that they probably sold identical blankets at the Wal-Mart. 

"Yeah, they do," Noah said. 

He was sitting in a niche in the wall of printers. Ronan was especially bad at dreaming printers, or especially good. He rarely produced one he could use for schoolwork, only printers than printed food, printers that printed clothes. Printers that printed plants and small toy cars and small toy people. 

Noah had several on of the people on his lap and was calmly surveying what appeared to be either a council of war or a marriage ceremony. Maybe both. Chainsaw fluttered about his lap and Noah batted her away before she could claim a small person as a prize. Ronan never discouraged her when she did this. He didn't see the point. The toy people were not alive, but plastic. Ronan had been unsettled by himself when he'd made them, and usually shoved them away in drawers or under the bed. They seemed to have adapted a whole drawer-bed civilization with its own rules and territories.

Noah said vaguely, "I think once I read a book about an Indian in a cupboard, but I don't know if that was even a real book. Sometimes I forget I can read."

"Yeah," Ronan said. "That's a real book." 

"What was it called?" Noah asked, momentarily possessed by something that only ever possessed Noah, a kind of blank ghost-longing.

"This is going to shock you," Ronan said.

Noah wilted, going wispy and unreal, as though he did not want to be shocked.

"It was called the Indian in the Cupboard," Ronan said. 

He'd read it too, but he had no idea how it ended. Niall had seen in in a store window in Dublin or Dubai or Duluth and decided to recreate it for his boys. He'd probably never bothered to read it himself before recreating it, so Ronan had no idea if the copy he'd read was the real thing.

"There was a scene with red-haired mermaids," Ronan said, though he suspected that really there wasn't.

"No," Noah said uncertainly. 

"Well, what the fuck do you know?" Ronan said.

Noah nodded. This was about right. 

"Try this for me?" Ronan said, holding up the coverlet. In response, Noah faded out and the plastic people dropped to the floor, where they ran around, shocked and injured, before gathering up the wounded and retreating under the bed. Chainsaw made off with one or two. They would struggle away from her, scratched but unharmed, within a minute or two. Not for the first time, Ronan wondered if he could dream clean and easy deaths for them, but this was something that bothered him more than the people did. He clenched his fists in the coverlet. He felt as though he'd dreamed for a thousand years. Maybe that meant that the coverlet worked.

Noah's form appeared under the coverlet, unmoving. Ronan watched him and wondered when he would pop his head out. He didn't. Ronan ripped it off of him and surveyed him. He looked frightened. 

"Does it work?" Ronan demanded.

Noah's mouth opened and then closed. Ronan poked him in the side until he seemed to calm.

"I don't like it," Noah said. He looked somehow less present than he had a moment ago.

"Well, it's not for you," Ronan said. He resolved to try it on someone else. The coverlet wouldn't work on Noah anyway. Noah did not feel time. Every day was Cabeswater day. He was therefore not the best test subject. 

"Adam," Noah said. "It's to give Adam time." He sounded wistful. He bit his lip. Even fading, he seemed somehow more a person around Ronan. Not more a person the way he was around Blue. Blue just made him more in general. But around Ronan he seemed to devolve into something like a teenage boy, something like what he must have been. The memories of Noah snapping into place around his ghostliness.

Ronan did not want to make it something it wasn't. Maybe it meant nothing to anyone but Ronan.

Noah did not indicate that it meant anything to him. He only sighed and said, "Alright," like he could already tell what Ronan was thinking. Ronan balled the coverlet up under his arm and they walked into Monmouth's main room together. On the mattress in the center of the room, Gansey slumbered lightly. His sleep was always light. He was collapsed over some books. He was not wearing glasses, which meant that his contacts were in and in a few hours his eyes would hurt and he would shoulder through it gallantly. Gansey was never red-eyed, and any pain he felt he did not share. Noah sat next to his head and gingerly pulled back his eyelids. Gansey slept on, evidently exhausted. His eyeballs flickered like something out of a horror movie.

"Gross," Ronan said.

"Shhh," said Noah, and tried to fish the contacts out. 

"You're going to blind him," Ronan informed him. Blind Gansey would be even more worldly-wise and responsible than regular Gansey, probably. Ronan didn't know if he could take that. "What time did he knock out?"

Noah shrugged.

"Come on. I know you know," Ronan said.

"Two hours ago, a little after he came back from D.C.," Noah said. He contorted his face in a way that gave Ronan the impression that he was digging the information out of himself. 

"Good," Ronan said, and threw the coverlet over Gansey. Then he went to the bathroom for a beer and poptart and a piss. When he came back, Gansey still slumbered. Ronan took a bite of his poptart and kicked him gently in the side until he blinked awake. 

"Ow," Gansey said, bringing his hands to his eyes. His hair and shirt were rumpled. It was hard to believe that Gansey was a normal and approachable human being until you saw him like this, gingerly fishing his contacts out of his eyes. 

"Sleep well?" Ronan asked him.

"Surprisingly, yes," Gansey said. "That's not the problem."

"How long, do you think?" Ronan asked.

Gansey stared at him, as though he were trying to figure Ronan out. After a moment, his face became pained. It had not been pained before, merely handsome. He'd been _expressing_ pain, but not showing it. But now it was not a physical ache that bothered him, but a pain to do with principles.

"How late are we?" he demanded, stripping off his shirt and pants and rushing into the bathroom. Ronan heard the shower start up. He sat on the bed next to Noah and ate his poptart.

"Five minutes," he told Noah.

"Three minutes," Noah said.

Noah was right. Gansey was fresh and clean three minutes later. 6 A.M. crew team practices had prepared him well. He could be up and ready in less time than it took Ronan to finish his beer.

"How late are we?" Gansey demanded again. "You can skip first period, but remember what Carlisle said. You can't miss another chem class."

Ronan had no idea how Gansey knew that. Neither he nor Adam was in Ronan's chem class; they'd both placed well enough to move on to A.P. Physics instead. 

"Relax," Ronan said. "I'll make chem class."

"You're not even dressed," Gansey said disapprovingly, shrugging on his chinos and sweater. "I can't believe you let me sleep that long."

"Feels like you slept a while, huh?" Ronan said.

"I got in at least a good four hours," Gansey said. "I haven't felt this--this--"

Ronan suspected that the word he was looking for was 'alert,' but Gansey was always alert, and knew it; that was part of his Ganseyness. The coverlet hadn't given him anything except extra time.

"Are you coming?" Gansey said, already sliding in a new pair of contacts and wincing. "I'm serious, Ronan. You have to make chem. We talked about this."

"I said I would," Ronan said. "You go on. I'll catch up."

Gansey slung his bag over his shoulder, picked up his journal, and grabbed his car keys. As he left he said, "You have to at least make chem!"

"You shouldn't sleep with your contacts in," Ronan called after him. He had the pleasure of hearing Gansey wryly shout, "Thanks!" as he hurried down the stairs and out to the Pig.

Ronan waited until he heard it pull away before checking his watch. It read 5:35 A.M. Classes did not start until 9:20. Ronan had no idea what Gansey would do for nearly four hours.

"Maybe he'll wake up the headmaster," Noah suggested. "Or the dean. Because he won't know what's happened and he won't realize that time passes more slowly under the blanket and he'll be confused. Maybe everyone will just pretend it's time to start the day, because he tells them it is. Maybe he'll drag the world back four hours."

"That's dark," Ronan said. 

But it seemed like something Gansey could do, even though it was more likely that he'd sit in his car, pouring over his journal and his thoughts and his Glendower, and wondering if it was too early to call on Fox Way. Maybe it was too early. Ronan doubted it. The psychics seemed to be in the kind of business that always required at least one person awake. Probably it would be the long tan-and-orange-striped one. 

Because he was not going back to sleep himself, Ronan finished his breakfast, pulled on some clothes, and gathered up the coverlet. Now that he knew it worked, he could deliver it. 

"Coming?" he asked Noah.

"Nah," Noah said. "He's supposed to be at work now. I'm going to go see Blue."

She was probably sleeping, and Ronan doubted she'd appreciate the 5 A.M. visit if she learned about it, but he wasn't sure Noah would tell her. Noah was sometimes there-and-not, a cold, odd little space not present enough to announce itself. Ronan didn't know if that was what Noah would become now. Probably he didn't mean to become that, but he'd become it anyway.

So Ronan and Chainsaw went to St. Agnes alone, though Noah was right: Adam was supposed to be at work. 

He wasn't. The Hondayota was still there, tucked in the back, next to the hedge that separated the church property from the preschool next door. The car had found an equally sorry companion to match it, a cheap Buick Regal. Adam was sitting in the passenger side of this car, head tilted to account for his hearing. There was a thin woman at the wheel. Ronan could make out very little of her beyond her dusty brown hair, but he knew who she was. He'd seen the shape of her enough times, colorless and fine-boned on the steps of the trailer, or watching from behind a curtain. She had always been wan and inert before, but now something animated her; she was speaking rapidly, with hand gestures. As she spoke, Adam buried his head in his hands.

Ronan stopped the BMW by the side of the rectory, where they wouldn't be able to see it. He took the coverlet with him rather than leave it in the car with Chainsaw, who would pick it to shreds. Stepping behind the hedge, onto the school's side of the property, he followed the high green wall until he could make out the woman's voice.

"You're not making it easier!" Adam's mother was saying wildly. "It was already hard, and you're not making it easier! You always have to make things hard, Adam. You know, there are kids who don't do that? Not you. It was always hard with you."

This was less straightforward than Robert Parrish. Ronan felt impotent and wildly considered hitting something. He wanted to produce a night horror. He was wide awake. He wanted to draw on Cabeswater. But this was something he thought Cabeswater couldn't fight, something too grey and neutral to be classed as outright pernicious.

Adam's voice was quiet and defeated when he spoke.

"I know," he said. "I--like I said. I can give you this. That's all I've got. That's all there is to spare."

Ronan couldn't see through the hedge to know what he passed her. There was a pause. Ronan wanted to burst through the hedge and fill it up with something real, with something violent, but he couldn't. He was on the moon and Adam and his mother were on the earth, and suddenly that was too much space to cross.

"There'd be more if you weren't doing this," Adam's mother said. Now she didn't sound wild and furious but warmer, twangier. "You're putting away to pay the rent to this church. For what? You know your father saw what you were up to. You think they wouldn't kick you out if they knew?"

Ronan sucked in a breath.

"Knew what?" came Adam's voice, confused.

"Adam," said his mother, the warmest mother yet. "I'm your mom. I don't hate you. I know it's not you, not really."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Adam said.

His mother switched back to upset. It was a fast switch. Even Ronan, who had been expecting it, who thought she was dirt, who had rage building in his throat and the pit of his stomach, had not expected a switch so fast.

"I hate it when you lie," she said, sounding ready to cry. "You think we're dumber than you, you really do. But when those smart little friends of yours are done with you, maybe we won't be so dumb. Maybe we won't need you either, Adam. Do you know how hard it is for me to say that? Do you know what you're pushing me to?"

Silence.

"You can go," Adam's mother said.

The creak of the passenger side door. A slam as it shut. Ronan heard soft footsteps, then the Buick pulling away.

When Ronan came around the hedge again, Adam was sitting on the ground, his back resting on Hondayota. Ronan knew he should leave, but he did not want to. He wanted Adam to know that he'd seen. He wanted Adam to know what he knew. He did not want another secret piling up, not when the first had snapped back against Adam.

"Parrish," he said. His voice came out heavy, growling. He could not make it soft.

Adam blinked. In the early morning light, he was especially colorless. The most vivid things about him were the circles under his eyes, so dark they seemed purple. Ronan thrust the coverlet at him. Adam looked at it like he'd never seen anything like it, never mind that he had a nearly-identical one ripped to shreds upstairs.

"You still have the money to cover the one Chainsaw ruined?" Ronan asked.

He knew Adam had given it to his mother, and Adam must know that he knew. But a wild part of him wanted to hear it. If Adam spoke it and made it true, then there would be a reason to unleash the fight inside him. Things would become clearer that way.

Adam took the coverlet and said tonelessly, "No. I don't. I won't be able to cover it. I had to call in sick at work today."

Then he stood and walked to the church. Something detached itself from the gloom of the hedge and followed him. It was a young woman, as barely-there as Noah could be. She had an elaborate Sunday hat and heavy fox furs around her throat. Before she went after Adam, she stopped before Ronan expectantly. Her mouth was a sprig of lilacs, her fingers were waving worms.

"What do you want?" Ronan breathed. He turned, hoping to find Adam, but Adam was already vanishing into the church. 

"What the fuck do you want?" Ronan said again. "Why didn't you help? What the fuck are you good for?"

The woman looked at him sorrowfully, a useless nightmare. It was like looking into a mirror. 

-

One summer, after a triumphant fourth of July homecoming for Niall (he had brought Ronan fireworks and cakes and seven live piglets that hiccuped up apples), Ronan awoke and Aurora was not there. 

It was not immediately clear that she was not there. Declan might have told him, had he been home, but Declan had been invited to spend two weeks with a friend's family in Fairfax County. Only fat, tow-headed Matthew was there, swinging his chubby legs at the kitchen table as a woman with red hair fed him some kind of stewed fruit.

Ronan was not sure what the woman was doing there. People appeared and disappeared and re-appeared at the Barns, usually whenever Niall needed them. The Barns was a working farm, and Niall could not possibly run it all himself. Ronan ran into the kitchen, secured himself a waffle and one of the cats, and then ran out again. The cat yowled at being so rudely picked up. The woman said, "Darling!" as though she were speaking to Ronan, but Ronan didn't think she was. He didn't know her. She looked enough like Aurora that he wondered briefly if she were an aunt or something. Other children had aunts and things like that.

Then he forgot about her.

He spent the morning dressing the cat in pieces of curtain and sheet, as though it were a vampire cat or a superhero cat, and stuffing it into hollow logs to watch it crawl out of the other side, and sending it into the various barns on various missions, which it never completed, preferring instead to curl up in a corner and wait for Ronan to find it. Niall was about, directing men or cows or horses. He would clap a hand on Ronan's head every time he passed; or else pick Ronan up, kiss him, and casually put him back down again before returning to his work.

It was a very normal day. 

It just went on very long. At several points, Ronan heard his name being called for lunch, but it was the wrong voice that was calling. Aurora's voice was low and sweet and Ronan knew it well. This woman's voice was high and breathy, like she'd been a bird or a bit of the north wind before she'd been a woman. Ronan did not know her and would not come when she called, not any more than the cat came when Ronan called it. It would not have been natural to come. So lunch came and went, and Ronan grew very hungry and dragged the cat to where the raspberries grew along the drive, and together they hunted for wild red treasure, Ronan determined and starving, the cat simply annoyed.

It was nearly evening when Ronan made it back to the house. He was so hungry that he knew he must find Aurora. He picked his way through his parents' room, but she was not there and neither were some of her things, the pictures of her and her hairbrush with its coils of golden hair. She was not in the den or in any of the boys' bedrooms, and she was not doing laundry in the cellar, nor was she cleaning the guest rooms or sorting through anything in the pantry.

Niall caught him as he was closing the door to the pantry and hefted him up by the collar and deposited him on a chair in the dining room. It was the wrong chair -- Declan's usual chair. Niall did not notice this. He took his usual seat at the head of the table and at his left, where Aurora was supposed to sit, was the red-haired woman.

"You look so hungry," she said, staring at Ronan. Her glass-green eyes were full of love and pity. She was very beautiful, as beautiful as Aurora had been, but she seemed to be newer and fresher. Aurora always seemed new and fresh, but Ronan had the odd sense that this woman was what you looked at if you ever got tired of looking at Aurora.

As soon as he had that sense, his mind skittered away from it. The woman took a fork and lifted up the lid on a pot in the middle of the table -- Aurora's pot -- and speared two sausages, which she deposited on Ronan's plate. 

"Try these," she said. She gave Ronan a hesitant and expectant smile, as though she hoped to please him.

"Her sausages are very good," Niall said through a mouthful, as though there were nothing wrong.

Ronan stared down at his plate. The sausages looked very enticing. He knew he did not want to touch them. Matthew gurgled happily and hit his plate with one chubby hand. Matthew was not so much younger than Ronan, but sometimes he seemed even younger than that, as parts of his insides did not exactly match up to his outsides. Ronan realized that Aurora was gone and Matthew was not clever enough to notice. For the first time since Declan had shown him the turnip patch, he wanted Declan.

"Where's mom?" he said. "I want mom's sausages."

The red-haired woman looked perplexed, like Ronan had started speaking a different language, or perhaps rearranged the world so that the sky was down and the earth was inside-out. She looked pleadingly at Niall. He patted her hand.

"Ariel's your mother," Niall said, jerking his chin at her, "and her sausages are very good, and you're going to eat them now." 

His tone was very casual and commanding. It was like God declaring that there would be light, and then there was. But when Ronan looked at the red-haired woman, he knew he did not know her.

"What happened to mom?" he tried again. "I want _mom_."

Niall put his fork down carefully, deliberately. Niall could do this and fill it with some unpredictable power, as though something in him were simmering and threatening to break loose. Niall could fill a room with that simmering, when he wanted to. It would be years before Ronan could do the same, and more years after that before Ronan would realize that he could.

Niall stood and lifted Ronan easily under his arms. He carried him out of the dining room and up the stairs. He deposited Ronan on the rug in his room -- a rug Aurora had made -- and said, "Your mother will be by with dinner later. See that you apologize to her when she comes. You won't be eating with the rest of us until you apologize to Ariel."

Then he closed the door, and Ronan heard the latch turn. He ran up to it and pounded and grabbed uselessly at the crystal knob, which would not turn. 

"I want mom!" he screamed. "I want mom!"

He had never really wanted Aurora before. Always Niall. Only Niall. But now he got neither. Niall did not come up to see him, only Ariel. Beautiful Ariel, with her flame-red hair and her eyes even larger and more loving that Aurora's had been, her legs even longer, her bust even larger. She had the key to Ronan's room around her neck, and she would pull Ronan's head into her lap and stroke his hair and say, "Darling, your father just wants you to stop this tantrum."

Normally when Ronan tantrumed it was loud and furious and Niall laughed and laughed. Now, Ronan went quiet. He spent three days and three nights in the room without making a sound, much less an apology. The room was outfitted with everything he could want -- bookshelves and books provided by Niall, a great four-poster bed made by Niall, several of the promised live ferrets, a hobby horse that propelled itself, spinning tops that cast light on the walls, a teddy bear that moved and served itself plastic food. Now he could see that these things were here because it meant he never had to leave the room. Niall could keep him here, contained and safe.

On the third night, Ronan slept and dreamt that he'd made a red cordless telephone with the right pattern of numbers outlined in glow-in-the-dark yellow-green, and then he dreamt that he woke up and called and someone picked up.

"Hello?" they said.

"Is Declan there?" Ronan said.

"I'm sorry, who is this?" said the person. "Do your parents know you're using the phone?"

"It's his brother," Ronan said. "It's Declan's brother. Tell him I need him! Tell him it's mom!"

And then he woke up and Ariel was at the door, alive and vigorous from her legs to her bust. Ronan had to hide the red telephone under his bed. When Ariel came in she pulled back the curtains just the same way Aurora had, and lifted him up just as gently as Aurora had. Her hands were just as soft. Her smile was just as sweet. She was, Ronan reflected, probably more beautiful. He could not remember if Aurora had been more beautiful. Ariel took him into the en-suite bathroom and bathed him just like Aurora had.

"Sweetheart," she said, passing her hands through his hair and shampooing it, "Can we stop this game?"

Because she had left the door open, Matthew toddled in. Somehow it hurt worst of all to see her with Matthew, who still looked so much like Aurora, but then he looked like Niall, too. So he still fit. And Matthew was not Ronan. He was uncomplicated. He liked Ariel. He came and buried his golden head in her neck and blew raspberries. She laughed and held him close, and just then she looked like she could be Ronan's mother.

Niall, in the doorway to the bathroom, cleared his throat. 

"Maybe the next one will look like you," he told Ariel, passing his hands through her red hair. But he looked at Ronan as he said it.

Ronan sunk under the water. When he came back up, his family was still looking at him, all three of them. He wanted to scream.

"I'm sorry," he said instead. "I'm sorry, mom. I want to scream."

Niall nodded. He lifted Ronan out of the tub and carried him downstairs, still naked. Ariel followed holding Matthew and a towel, obedient as a puppy. On the steps of the house, Ronan stood and screamed and screamed and Niall sat next to him and added a good few bellows. Ronan felt as though his heart would break, and when he was done he buried his head in his father's shoulder and sobbed.

"It's alright," Niall said. "It's alright. I know it's frightening, but she'll love you as much as I do, Ronan. I promise."

Ariel fluttered around them, anxiously toweling the bits of Ronan she could reach.

She was not cruel. She was lovely to look at. By the end of the week, Ronan could not hate her. They were watching a movie together and she was helping him dress the cat in its cape when something upstairs rang shrilly, and Ronan looked up stupidly, wondering what it was. 

Niall came down the stairs, holding the red telephone he'd fished out from under Ronan's bed. He seemed more irritated than puzzled by it.

"No, there's nothing wrong," Niall said. "She's right here. His mother's right here."

Then, "He can't be sick. He hardly ever gets sick. None of them do."

Then, haltingly, like he was trying to re-learn a language he hadn't spoken in a long time, " _You're_ sick? What, all of you? Wouldn't it be better if you kept him, so he doesn't bring the sickness home? Yes. Yes, I know I said he never gets sick, but--"

It was no use. Declan was home that afternoon, pulling his duffel out of the backseat of a white Lexus. Niall went out to meet him and greet the guests, but whatever Niall said to them made them turn and leave without coming up to the house. Something in the banked and secret parts of Niall simmered with dissatisfaction and played around his mouth. This was a frightening thing to see in a man like Niall. Ronan hid himself behind the umbrella stand and listened as Niall and Declan climbed the steps to the house. 

"Everyone in the house got sick?" Niall was asking.

"Food poisoning, I think," Declan said promptly. "They were eating clams."

"Why weren't you? You love clams," Niall said. "What was wrong with the clams?"

"I don't know," Declan lied. "I just knew I didn't want them and then I turned out to be right." 

Ronan had the sense that Declan had come back too soon. Declan was supposed to be gone for two weeks and had only been gone one. One week was not enough time to make Ariel really seem normal. Maybe for Matthew, but not for Ronan and definitely not for Declan.

"Where's Ronan?" Declan said, as he came in through the door, clutching his duffel with both hands. He made his tone seem so innocent that anyone would be able to tell he was up to something. Niall chuckled. Ariel appeared at the end of the hallway.

"Declan?" she said, holding out her arms. "Oh, it's my Declan! It's our oldest! It's Declan!"

Declan dropped his duffel. Ronan thought he would scream at her or ask for Aurora, but he didn't bother with Ariel at all. He turned right to Niall instead.

"You did it again!" he said wildly. "You did it again! Where's Ronan? Why did you do it again?"

Niall always spoke more frankly to Declan than he did to Ronan. He said, "Declan, not this horseshit again. This isn't like before. Ronan's fine with her now."

"Ronan's not fine!" Declan protested. "Ronan's not fine!"

Because Niall knew everything, he knew where Ronan was. He reached behind the umbrella stand and lifted him easily and dropped him gently on the hall rug. Ronan wanted to die.

"Tell him you're fine, Ronan," Niall said impatiently. "You were playing with Ariel ten minutes ago."

Ronan did not want to say anything. He did not want to lie. He hid his head in his hands. Declan stared at him, betrayed. 

"Well, who cares if Ronan's fine?" he spat. "I'm not fine! I don't want her! I don't know her! What happened to _my_ mother? Was she ever even here? Would it matter if I wanted her, or does it only matter when Ronan does?"

He shoved Ronan and Niall shouted, but Declan was too quick for Niall to grab him. He was up the stairs and in his room in a flash. Ronan had been locked out of the world until he apologized. But Declan locked the world out. Ronan rattled his knob anxiously and said, "Declan, Declan," sobbing like his heart would come out. Niall was saying things, and so was Ariel, but Ronan did not hear them.

Declan stayed in his room for the whole evening. At nightfall, when Niall had given up and gone downstairs to drink and dream, Declan opened the door and looked down at Ronan pitilessly.

"I hate you," Declan said. "I hate him and I hate you. Was she not good enough this time, Ronan? Did you not want to make another baby like her? I _hate_ you, Ronan."

Ronan stared at him, perplexed, and began to cry. He did not know what Declan meant. That night, his dreams were black and confusing, and in them Niall took Matthew and buried him alive in the turnip patch, next to Declan and Aurora and Alice, the only real person in the world. He gave Ronan the cat instead to be his brother. When Ronan woke up, his bed was covered in fluffy, scaly white things with hideous red eyes and many beaks. 

Niall looked disturbed when he saw them. When he spoke, his tone was careful and light. He said, "They're just night horrors. That's all. Just horrors. I was getting them when I was younger than you."

He acted as though there was nothing wrong with getting night horrors, and told Ronan he would soon have things fixed, and the very next day Ariel was gone and Aurora had returned. Niall said they had only been working things out, but that of course she was his wife and divorce was out of the question.

But the night horrors did not go away. When Ronan began first grade in the fall, he brought them to school with him, even though he soon forgot about Ariel as anything other than a temporary lapse, evidence of his father's one fatal flaw: disloyalty. Ronan's flaw was the horrors. He carried them with him everywhere. They would not let him forget that Declan hated him.

-

Ronan and Chainsaw and the Cabeswater vision waited just outside the door of the apartment. Chainsaw did not like the vision. Whenever she tried to peck at it, her pecks connected with nothing. Ronan did not know how this was possible. The vision could make itself solid enough to knock at Adam's door. Ronan tried to kick it away. Like Chainsaw, he could not touch it. It continued to knock at erratic intervals. 

Eventually Adam opened the door. The vision passed into his apartment. 

Adam said, "Maybe they're all people who died on the ley line. Maybe this is what Noah's becoming."

Ronan glanced up at him sharply. In the weak light from the apartment, his cheekbones and thin mouth seemed more pronounced than usual, darker and more hollow. The shadow of a vine played on his skin, but there were no vines that Ronan could see. It wasn't until he was in the apartment that they became clear, the ghosts of great creeper vines along all the walls, the floor, the bed. Adam sat on the mattress, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, and more vines faded in and out along him, snaked around his feet as though to lock him in place. He lifted his feet when he realized, and brushed the vines off of the bed with one wildly flailing arm. 

He said, "She's sick."

It took Ronan a moment to realize that he meant this literally. He wasn't simply stating the obvious.

"Insurance doesn't cover the medicine that could really help her," Adam continued. His voice seemed to be slipping away from him, becoming more Henrietta with every syllable. "She said she sent my dad to tell me and she thought I sent him away. She thought I was blowing her off, like that's what it means when I don't want to see him."

"Why doesn't he fucking cover her medicine?" Ronan asked. "It's his wife."

He did not want to name that woman Adam's mother. He did not know her name.

"When I was kid," Adam said, lying back and closing his eyes, "he would take me out to the store. To buy shoes. Or get a school bag. Or anything. When we got back to the house, he'd make her pay him back. She'd have to do it. He'd say, 'You owe me ten dollars for the kid,' or whatever it was I cost."

A vine curled over Adam's face. Adam let it. He said, "I always knew exactly how much I cost. How much I was worth."

Ronan said nothing. The Cabeswater-vision had vanished entirely, but the vines continued to conquer the room. When Ronan crossed to the bed he could half-feel their weight crunching under his feet. He pulled them off of Adam and felt them disintegrate in his hands. Adam's chest shook and Ronan thought for a moment that he was crying, but he wasn't. He was laughing wildly.

"Come on!" he said, voice cracking. "I left that wide open. You were supposed to say, 'We both know you're not worth a lot, Parrish.' Come _on_."

It was hysterical and insincere and reminded Ronan of Kavinsky. He tasted ash. He leaned over Adam now, put both hands on his chest and pressed, just for a moment. Not a hit. He didn't want to -- he would never hit Adam. But just pressure, to make him stop.

"Stop it," he said, very low. "Adam, stop it." 

Adam kept laughing, but it was a tight and burbling thing, an ugly and muddy spring coming out of him. He laughed until the laugh ran out. His chest was thin and firm under Ronan's hands, hot enough to feel through his coveralls. His heart was pounding as much as Ronan's was. 

"When I left my house, I thought she'd never speak to me again," Adam said. 

He'd left his house because of Ronan. His voice rang in Ronan's ears, painful and dusted in the earthy tones of Henrietta. Thought she'd never speak to me again. Again. _Ah-gay-enn._ Ronan was not sorry. He was not sorry that Adam was out. The vines crept back in over Adam and Ronan forced them off, furious.

"Here she is," Adam continued, as though this weren't happening at all. "I guess I was wrong, because here she is."

He closed his eyes again and now he was crying, silver tinting the dark grooves under his eyes, the high fair cheekbones. Ronan wanted to press his thumbs to the tracks and wipe them away. When he realized this, he sat back, stung. In his absence the vines crept over Adam thicker and faster, and Ronan, cursing, renewed his efforts to keep them at bay.

"Why are you doing that?" Adam said. "They're just--they're just trying to comfort."

"What?" Ronan said, stopping.

"They're not trying to hurt me," Adam said slowly, like he was repeating something someone else had said. "Cabeswater's not trying to hurt me."

The vines crawled over him. Adam closed his eyes again and let them, a shape-shifter, a magician reinvented. They crept over his mouth, where they erupted into ferns; over his eyes, where they flowered into improbable blue blossoms.

"They don't hurt," came Adam's voice, soft and muffled. "I didn't want to let Cabeswater in the car. I was worried it would hurt her. Even though it wouldn't. She's--she's not him, no matter what she asks for. God, I'm so stupid. I'm always scared of Cabeswater, but it's not something that means to scare."

He was all covered now. He hadn't needed a new coverlet. He had a coverlet of greenery. Only his hands were free, his long-fingered hands with their elegant nail beds. He lifted them to Ronan and caught Ronan's chest, and where his fingers touched Ronan felt heat and pressure and life. He couldn't bear it. He felt as though he ought to be scored and wounded there, where Adam touched him.

"It's just wild and powerful," Adam said. "It's like you."

Something in Ronan broke, as though his tattoo had plunged inwards and carved up his spine. He felt brave enough to dare. He put his hands over Adam's hands. 

"What do you mean?" he asked quietly. But his brain screamed _know me, know me_. He did not understand why he was the way he was. He was too wild to be just a boy, practically half-forest. Half-dreamscape. He had always been drawn to Adam Parrish, but Adam Parrish had not seemed like a real possibility until he too went wild and magic. Only then did he seem like something Ronan could be allowed to touch. 

Adam didn't answer at first. His hands clutched Ronan back even as the vines circled around his wrists.

"Safe," he said wonderingly. "You feel safe."

It was too much. Ronan wanted to see him. He surged forwards and brushed the vines off of Adam's face. They collapsed into dust in his mouth and eyes, and Adam sputtered and spat it out, and was up in a flash, shrugging vines off of himself.

"What was--" he started, still spitting out dust. "God, Ronan. God."

Even dusty, on a cheap mattress that was by now more jungle than bed, he was something to drink in. It seemed impossible to think that Cabeswater -- the same Cabeswater his father had drained for years -- had touched this boy and brought him down to Ronan's level. Ronan knew it was wrong and yet he savagely did not care. Adam wore magic so carefully and elegantly that it could not be wrong to encourage it. For the first time since Niall's death, Ronan thought it could not be wrong. 

"Who wants safe?" Ronan told him. He picked up a coating of dust and sprinkled it on Adam's hair, where it mingled easily. It was messy, earthy magic, less luminous than the kind he was used to. He drank it in anyway. He said, "Your soul's fucking spliced with a forest at this point. You don't need safe. You're not safe."

"Yeah, too far gone, I guess," Adam said. Then he furrowed his fair brow. "You've been saying that a lot. Spliced with a forest. Half-forest. Why?"

Ronan stared at him and swept an arm around at the room. Vines on the walls, in the floor, on the window, on the ceiling. 

"Seriously?" Ronan said. 

Adam flushed. "It reminds me of Gwenllian," he said. "You know. Mongrel. Like I'm mixed up with it all. Mixed breeding."

"And you want your only breeding to be -- what?" Ronan said. He directed his arm now at the window that looked over the parking lot, at where the Buick Sedan had been. At a spectral Robert Parrish and Robert Parrish's wife. He did not think Adam had been bred from them at all. He thought Adam's breeding was Henrietta itself, its dust and wild white back roads and moonlit night. 

"You want to be looked at like nothing more than your parents' kid?" he finished derisively. 

Adam looked down at his hands, at the fine bones and jutting thumbs. At the dust that now coated him.

"No. But I am what I am," he said dully.

"Bullshit," Ronan said. "You're never just what you are, Parrish. You're always trying to be something more."

Adam winced. But it was not an insult. It fell out of Ronan's mouth carelessly, but he realized that it was not an insult. The trying to be something more _was_ Adam, had always been Adam, an Adam that predated even Cabeswater. He had always been in awe of that Adam, the bitter boy so rebellious that he could claw his way out of his birthright and into a new one. 

It had not been Cabeswater that made Ronan want him, but this still defiance and quiet rebellion. 

"Parrish," he said now, overwhelmed, "Don't make that something it's not."

He was not quite speaking to Adam. He was speaking to himself. He didn't want to speak. He suddenly wanted his hands on Adam again, this time without the vines. He didn't know what he wanted. He was neither happy nor furious, and it had been a long time since he'd been anything beyond those two emotions.

"I'm always making what you say into something it's not," Adam said slowly. "Or--no. What you do. How you act."

The wince had not left his face, merely taken up permanent residence with his features and become a part of him. Adam was good at incorporating his blows. Now he said, "It's vanity. I--"

He broke off and something wild crept into his face. Ronan was reminded of the night Adam had traded himself to Cabeswater, the night he'd stood shaking and turbulent before Whelk.

"Can I tell you something?"Adam said. "I have to tell you something. Because it doesn't matter, what I make it all into, or what you -- how you look at me."

His hands twisted in the dusty sheets beneath him, like he was trying to send out tangled roots. He was not a careful magician now. He seemed to have encountered a problem he had no idea how to solve, bigger than his parents, bigger than Matthew or Aurora -- bigger even than Noah.

"I think I'm going to kill Gansey," he said. "He's going to die within the year. Blue and the psychics know. And it's going to be because of me."

Ronan stared at him. 

"I saw it in the Dreaming Tree," Adam said, "I saw how angry you'll be. So it doesn't matter what I think now, what I make you into."

His face was white and his eyes were heavy with some remote imbalance even Ronan could not name. In Ronan's mind, all was clamor. 

Something urgent and violent crested inside him. Ronan pushed off the bed. He could not turn the din off. Chainsaw squawked around his head and Ronan turned, pushed past the walls of vines, and was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Niall's last autumn was the autumn Ronan met Gansey. 

Ronan heard of him before he met him, and what he heard was distinctly implausible. A new sophomore and instantly the crew team captain. The star of debate and the literary journal. The sensible voice of the Young Republicans. Gansey had apparently been signed up for a plethora of advanced classes, but within a week had proven abysmal at calculus. No one could have guessed this to look at him. To preserve his dignity, he was quickly transferred to algebra II. He slid into the seat next to Ronan and looked at his problem set and said, "Oh no. The missing X again. I can never find her. I wish they'd stop asking me to find her. We need to give it up. She's never coming back."

Ronan was established by then. He did not have the tattoo and he was growing his hair out again because Niall made less comments that way, but still. Ronan was by now raw. Raw with Emphasis. Raw the way only a wild boy could be. _Raw_. Everyone at Aglionby knew this. It allowed Ronan to settle in with the Skovs and the Swans. He was finding a place for himself outside the Barns.

Richard Campbell Gansey III was still not his breed. Ronan was a Rottweiler. Gansey was something far more intelligent and expensive. Possibly the hand that held the leash. Ronan could acknowledge this without bitterness. He did not want to be so classically American. He did not want team sports and boating shoes, girls in tennis skirts, charity dinners, canapes. That was Declan's line. Ronan knew that the Lynches were meant to be something altogether wilder, and even then he did not see the point in pursuing a lie.

But whatever Ronan was, dog or wild thing, in those days he did not feel it like a wall of spikes and brambles. So when Gansey slid next to him, fretting, Ronan only said, "Ask Y."

Gansey broke into a smile. Ronan, who was immune to most things that did not come from the Barns, was not immune to that. 

It helped that Gansey had about him something familiar to Ronan, a perverse mix of the real and unreal. No one else would have called it that. Even Gansey seemed not to realize it was there. Within a week Ronan could tell that he had not yet sorted out which version of Gansey was truest: the one that charmed professors into grading him twenty points extra for effort and leadership potential, or the one that patiently slid his journal out from underneath his algebra workbook and politely ignored the mystery of the missing X for the rest of the period.

A bigger, grander mystery unfurled inside Gansey. Aglionby watched the perfect jaw and summer-tousled hair. Ronan watched the strange scribblings in the journal. The journal, he knew, was secret and true, talismanic. The more he looked at it, the more Ronan had the wild thought that perhaps Gansey was like his father, like Ronan himself, and could dream pieces of his very soul into reality.

One day, well into October, Gansey sought Ronan out. Ronan was tucked into a weathered seat in the library's portico. He was annoyed because Declan had dragged him to school early. He was listening to furious music to avoid falling asleep. Gansey appeared fresh from crew practice with his hair wet from the showers, his button-down clinging to his shoulders and upper arms. He regarded this with some consternation, picking at the cotton chambray with a look of distaste. Ronan's eyes followed the movement. His headphones blared angrily, a dissonant and inappropriate soundtrack for this handsome apparition.

Gansey tapped his own ears impatiently. Ronan removed the headphones.

"Lynch," Gansey said. He looked split the way he usually did, the way only Ronan could seem to see. His voice was low, but cold and commanding. "Van Buren says you have licenses."

Licenses for what? Ronan had not yet been able to produce a car, and Niall was refusing to lend him the BMW until he did, so it took a moment to connect this statement to last term's joyride. When he did connect it, Ronan shrugged. He could dream his own. He'd dreamt a few for people here and there. He did not really know if he could dream one for Gansey. He wondered if it would come out with the photo split down the middle: one face the crew team captain, the other the strange secret-keeper of the journal.

"How much?" Gansey demanded.

Ronan never charged. There was no point. He didn't need money. It was the thrill of the dreaming, the thrill of showing it off to Niall. That was what mattered. His classmates rarely had anything to top that.

"What's in your journal?" Ronan asked.

A brief, quizzical look passed over Gansey's handsome features. Ronan had the sense that he'd surprised him, and grinned.

"Do you really want to know?" Gansey asked. 

Ronan nodded.

"Come on, then, Lynch," Gansey said, raising an eyebrow and beckoning for Ronan to follow him. They circled to the back of the library and across the green, ducking past groups of chattering boys with lacrosse sticks and textbooks and heavy-laden athletic bags. Ronan received one or two acknowledgments, but Gansey received far more, taking each one with the easy nods of one so superior in rank that it was likely the greetings barely even registered. 

Then they were in the parking lot behind the Founder's house. There Ronan met the Camaro. 

_Orange_ , Ronan thought. And _wreck_. And _want_. And _fuck, fuck, fuck_. It was a car that screamed high-stress, and burning asphalt, and chaos and moonlight. Ronan could not help but pass his hands carefully over it, the same way he touched newly-made dreams.

"So you see my dilemma," said Gansey, breaking momentarily through the fog. "I'll have a Virginia license in two months."

"That's too long," Ronan said automatically, as though it were him with this promising orange disaster, and him without a legal right to drive it.

"I quite agree," Gansey said. Then he sighed. "You know, in El Salvador you can drive at fifteen. And that's El Salvador." 

Ronan had never thought that he might admire a single thing about El Salvador. He bet Gansey hadn't either. Yet for a moment they traded looks, completely in agreement. El Salvador was in some ways a wiser and better place than Virginia. Ronan broke the look by sticking his head in through the open passenger-side window and admiring from that vantage point. Even from the inside, the car promised swift disorder if not handled well. It reminded Ronan of the wild boars Niall had produced one day to frighten away door-to-door Pentecostals. Tougher than they looked, more marvelous than you might think, and intractable to the core.

"It's a pig," Ronan muttered.

"Excuse me?" Gansey said. He looked not just extremely offended, but actually hurt.

"Relax," Ronan said. "I live on a farm. It's a compliment."

He watched Gansey file away this piece of information as though it were something surprising, which it really wasn't. Ronan's roughness had to come from somewhere. 

"So you'll do it?" Gansey said. "The license?"

Ronan would do it. He knew he would do it. Nevertheless, he said, "Dude. You said you were going to show me the journal." 

Sighing, Gansey pulled open the door to the Camaro and unlocked the passenger side, then gestured for Ronan to get in. Ronan climbed in. Gansey opened the glove compartment and produced the journal. But before passing it to Ronan he held it back and asked, "What do you know about Welsh kings?"

It was the kind of last-minute half-command Niall might issue. It even had a brief note of challenge in it, as though Gansey judged people according to their answers, according to their ability to pass this test. Ronan rolled his eyes and said, "I'll know whatever you decide to tell me, man," and swiped the journal out of his grasp.

Sketches. Newspaper clippings. Notes on ley lines and Welsh history and witches and death averted. Gansey's precise, anxious hand had recorded accounts of people who'd survived horrific accidents, people who had pieces of the land and sky inside them, people who thought they had died long ago, people who'd lost their souls, people who had too many souls. As soon as Ronan realized what it was, realized what this might contain, he gave the journal the same careful treatment as the Camaro. He traced lines with his fingers and made sure to check every crammed corner of every page. If Gansey could collect all this then maybe Gansey knew, maybe one of his articles or notations would carry an explanation. Ronan felt like he might turn the page and find it.

Himself and Niall.

He did not know how long he looked through the journal. At some point the bell rang and neither he nor Gansey noticed. Gansey was by then paging through books of Virginia topography with the air of a man who knew exactly what he was looking for. It was only when Tad Carruthers knocked obnoxiously on Gansey's window and regaled him with a, "Hey, III, didn't see you in bio today," that they even realized they'd missed class.

"I'll talk to the dean," Gansey assured Ronan, like Ronan cared.

Ronan said, "You ever been to Nino's?" 

Gansey shook his head, as Ronan knew he would. Gansey did not look like the type anyone would dare introduce to Nino's. 

"Let's go to Nino's after school, man," Ronan said. "Bring the journal. You'll get your license."

During fifth period he took a cat nap rather than listen to Whelk, and after classes they drove to Nino's in Gansey's wild Pig, stopping to pick up Gansey's roommate, a strange, smudgy boy who Ronan shared no classes with and who gave the impression of existing entirely by accident. Ronan pored over the journal, still hoping. Gansey poured out a stranger story than even Ronan had been expecting, death and resurrection, kings and sleepers. It made Ronan think eerily of buried things that were neither living nor dead. Ronan felt that he was being introduced to a Gansey buried somehow, a Gansey hidden behind crew team practices and talks with the dean. The real Gansey.

"So when you find Glendower, what are you going to ask for?" Ronan said, interrupting. Gansey's story seemed to beg this question, but Ronan couldn't think what Gansey could need. Ronan would ask for a car, if it were him, but Gansey already had the best one.

Gansey broke off mid-tale.

"You believe me?" he asked carefully.

Ronan shrugged. "Yeah," he said. Of course he did. Gansey's story was strange, but no stranger than Niall's lamps made of mist, his trees that sprouted words, his lilac-colored kittens and gold-tinted cows.

"Okay. This may seem difficult to believe, but I think I get humored a lot," Gansey said. He said it with an old man's exhaustion, or else with the air of a precocious and sad child who spoke like an adult. There was something odd and ageless to him.

For the first time in years, Ronan wanted to ask someone to the Barns. For the first time in his life, Ronan felt as though someone from the outside might fit in at the Barns, hitherto the timeless domain of the Lynches alone. But he did not extend the invitation right away. He and Gansey gravitated more easily towards each other over the next few months, and Ronan let it build. He waited in the library portico to catch Gansey after crew practice, and Gansey chased him down after tennis lessons just to have someone to go ley-hunting with. Ronan met Noah, and Monmouth Manufacturing. Gansey met Matthew, and bravely soldiered through several encounters with Declan. Ronan stopped being Lynch, though Gansey largely stayed Gansey, except for when he finally got his actual license and began to lecture Ronan on how Ronan was too good to be hauled before the state police for manufacturing fake ones. Then he was Dick through and through. 

At Nino's again, on the last day before winter holidays, Ronan said, "I haven't even done a license since I did yours."

Gansey frowned. He had apparently been hoping they wouldn't mention how his transgressions aligned with Ronan's. He said, "Well. Good. You're not like Skov and Swan and the rest of them. I don't see what you get out of peddling illegal goods."

Ronan had barely even seen Skov and Swan in the past month. He'd slid out of that orbit and into Gansey's. 

"You're a prig in a Pig," Ronan said. "Hey, come to my house."

He said it casually, but it was not a casual invite; it was one he'd considered. The Barns was at its best around the holidays. Even when it was merely grey and wet in the rest of the surrounding country, the Barns enjoyed snow-capped trees and mountains, improbable flowers peeking up from the ice, indigo-blue nights and pink-tinged, celebratory mornings. And Niall had just come home in time for the holidays, was home right now, returned at last from some long errand he would only really explain to Declan.

"You know you told me you lived on a farm," Gansey said, as though he still could not believe this piece of information. As though, possibly, farms were just improbable things in general.

"But what a fucking farm," Ronan agreed.

Gansey drove up to the Barns two days later, his car a hideous orange affront against the snowy drive. He was handsome and wind-tousled when he got out, and if he did not quite look like he belonged, then neither was he aggressively out of place. His genteel Virginia manners charmed Aurora and had no negative effect on Matthew, who was rarely negatively affected by anything but who nonetheless Gansey clearly saw as someone to impress. Then, leading him around to the office, Ronan introduced him to Niall.

Ronan had thought it would be something. Introducing Gansey was a little like introducing a dream, after all, and Niall always welcomed Ronan's dreams. 

But Gansey was polite and a little bit puzzled, and Niall charming and hurried. Niall talked about music for a few minutes -- Gansey had spotted a strange golden-stringed instrument and wanted an explanation -- but otherwise he had some business he'd been attending to in New York that needed urgent attention, something he and Declan were talking over in low tones and that left Declan scowling. So Ronan and Gansey had interrupted, and they were politely but plainly directed back to the house. Ronan let Gansey start back towards its warm cheer alone and lingered long enough to let his disappointment show.

"You like him, right?" he asked Niall.

"Well, I want you rubbing elbows with his kind, so I'll say that I do," Niall said easily, like it was only the surface Gansey he could see. "If he has a sister or some pretty cousin, even better. You'll want to keep up with that. Not just for you, but for Declan too, you know. You could have any girl you want." 

Then he smiled his challenging smile. 

"Now, see, that would be someone to host here at the Barns, wouldn't it, Ronan?"

And he closed the office door. He left Ronan standing there with his mind unable to approach this new test. It was like Niall had produced a future with jagged edges, a Barns Ronan could not fit himself into. Though Gansey seemed urgent, more important than anything, more real than anything, Niall traded in the unreal, and had rejected Gansey for something that fit awkwardly in Ronan's mind.

For a moment, Ronan felt weighed-down and small, very small.

-

After Niall's death, Gansey's halo of urgency faded. He was no less magnificent, but Ronan gave him more reason to be anxious, commanding, and in control. Ronan understood then why he and Niall had not seemed impressed with eachother; he'd introduced Niall to his appointed successor. 

Gansey occupied a curious place. He was not Ronan's to keep, and he was not always _enough_ for the Ronan that came after Niall's death. But he gave some of himself to Ronan anyway.

-

Ronan had to act and so he did, though all the pieces were rearranged and wrong. It should have been Gansey, Noah, Blue, and Adam with him, and they should have been in the Pig. Instead it was only Matthew and Noah, and the Pig trailed behind at a distance.

Ronan could just make out Gansey and Blue's forms if he stared in the rearview mirror. He didn't stare. There was a jagged crack down the center of the group. Part of it was Ronan's doing, for the summer of Kavinsky and now this autumn spent disappearing to the Barns. Part was Adam and Gansey's doing, for their endless fighting and the ever-present caution that followed. And part was Blue Sargent's fault, simply for showing up. She was a walking catalyst, magic amplified, she appeared and rearranged the group's workings. This was what it meant to be magic. Gansey thought magic could be orderly and just and beneficial, but more often it was wild disorder. It meant rearranging things, bringing the real and hard truth to the surface. 

Noah, in the backseat, curled in on himself and flickered.

"I wish you wouldn't," he said indistinctly. 

"Why not?" Ronan said.

Noah seemed to shrink in answer.

"When he knows, everything changes," he said.

"The apple of fucking knowledge," was all Ronan said.

Matthew said, "I like apples. Do you think if an apple could grow another apple, the seeds would be tiny apples inside?" 

Ronan had no idea if Matthew was catching his conversation with Noah, or merely asking because he was momentarily curious about this.

"Sure, but they can't do that," Ronan said. "I don't even know what that is."

"Okay," said Matthew, shrugging. "Me neither."

Matthew's aspect did not change as they neared the Barns. It should have changed. Ronan had been coming back for months, but Matthew had not been back in over a year. Was it possible that Matthew had forgotten the way the roads went wild in this part of Virginia, the ever-present mist, the promise of the autumn-dotted mountains? The spikes of red poison ivy here should be familiar, the lush and out-of-season berries, the blue blossoms as they turned onto the drive. Ronan watched him anxiously, desperate for a reaction. Matthew watched the road, and was as blankly pleased by it as he was by food, church, team sports, failing grades, and reports of fatal bear attacks. 

"Are you happy?" Ronan asked.

Matthew broke into a smile. Ronan would kill things to produce that smile.

"Sure," Matthew said. 

"Because of the Barns?" Ronan prompted. "Or does it make you sad?"

Matthew looked confused. "Should I be sad?" he said. "Dad died. I should be sad. Do you think I should be sad?"

"Be what you want to be," Ronan urged him.

"Okay," Matthew said. "But should I be sad?"

Ronan's hands shook on the steering wheel. 

When he came here with Adam, approaching the Barns was a performance. He'd do a big showy slide at the end of the driveway, he'd grab up fruit and toss it Adam's way, he'd collect the red dirt and sprinkle it down the back of Adam's collar. No matter what Ronan did, it did not alter the outcome: against the backdrop of the Barns' colors -- purple plums, verdant green trees -- Adam appeared sharper and fairer and leaner, an erl-king in a glen. He did not fit the Barns, the farm it had been, the sun-tinted home. He only transformed the Barns into something more subtly brilliant-hued than that.

But now there was no Adam, and next to Noah's wavering form and Matthew's happy golden apathy, the Barns seemed somehow dim in the autumn mist. The Camaro pulling up made it worse; Ronan measured the drive and the house and the silos and barns against his memories, and found them lacking. The freshness was gone, he thought with frustration. The color and brightness did not seem quite right. Something had deteriorated. Before Gansey and Blue could ask him any questions, he stomped around the side of the house and accosted the fields. These, too, were lacking. 

"Oh, hey, that's my shoe," Matthew said behind him. "Did we come here to get my shoe? I think it probably doesn't fit me anymore."

In response, Gansey cleared his throat before anyone else could answer. He and Blue had caught up.

"Just let me show you," Ronan said. 

He did not want to talk. There was too much inside him -- there had been for a long time. He'd inked it on his skin, the too much, with spikes and brambles and prickly roots. It was easier that way. That way, everyone who bothered to look would know. It was as honest as concealment got. Ronan wondered if he'd learned it from Niall.

They trooped through the fields, past the spot where Alice's shed had stood before Niall had torn it down in a fit of pique. They followed the orchard path, and Ronan heard Blue exclaim at the pearl-white cherries, like department-store ornaments on the vine. Now when Ronan started for the stream nothing jumped out of his way; all was sleeping and still. 

Gansey seemed to step on something because he made a displeased sound. Blue said, "Oh no, it's a--"

"Leave it," Ronan said. 

It was a fire-bellied salamander or a toad that hiccuped out folk songs. It was a beetle that left a trail of grape juice, or a guitar wrapped in living skin. It didn't matter what it was. Niall's pastures wouldn't feel the hit, and these fields of secondhand dreams seemed past regretting.

The bridge, when Ronan reached it, seemed too small. His feet now covered three planks apiece. The wood was rotting, too frail to hold a son as big as Niall. Niall had dreamed himself a carpenter, but he had not bothered to dream tools that had longevity. This thought stretched out a nail and scored the flesh of Ronan's heart. Niall had thought he could keep dreaming forever. 

At the edge of the property, Ronan found the straight white trees. They still looked like bars. Ronan wondered if they were meant not to keep people in, but to keep what was beyond them out. He wondered if Niall had ever really trusted one of his creations. Probably not. He didn't make them for trusting. And Ronan didn't always fully trust his. Matthew. Just Matthew. He took Matthew's hand then. It was much, much harder to squeeze through the trees this time, and Matthew said, "Ow," several times, because Matthew was as large and great as a Lynch too.

Predictably, Blue made it through first. Noah next -- he did not seem to pass through the trees as much as make it difficult to acknowledge that they were there at all. Gansey struggled through last, his broad shoulders no great asset when it came to squeezing through tight spaces. 

The veined turnip greens waved in their patch. It felt like summer here. Warm. Ronan could not understand why the warmth, why Niall had determined that warmth would be necessary. Surely they would disintegrate faster in the heat. Maybe, he thought stupidly, Niall had just not wanted them to be cold. 

Ronan kneeled at the edge of the turnip patch and grasped the nearest stem and pulled.

Half of her face peeled off as she came up, like it was so much wrapping to hold the bones together. The other half stayed, calm and smiling, green eyes blinking open and then closing again, red hair shining in the light. Ronan felt as though he had seen her before, but could not find the memory. It took him a moment to realize that Gansey and Blue had shouted behind him. He hadn't heard it. It reached him only after some delay. He did not want to turn and look at their faces. They would see something in his brambles and secrets that they hadn't before. Ronan did not want to lie to them, but neither did he want to know their reaction to the truth. 

He said, "Matthew."

Matthew was there in an instant, fresh and ready, like a newly-trained puppy eager to show it could respond to commands. He said, "It's a lady."

He did not sound scared or shocked. He said it matter of factly. He added, "Should I do one too?" like Ronan had brought him here to teach him how to harvest women with his bare hands.

"No," Ronan said, and pulled up another. She was dark-skinned and had large curls, and came apart at the shoulders. She still sighed as he set her on the grass, before settling back into dreaming. Then another. A blonde. Then more. Some of them moved their lips like they were forming words. Some smiled. None looked remotely hurt. All slept. Ronan still felt sick to touch them. He placed them as gently as he could, making rows, matching skin to bone where he thought it fit. He found a few more of the redhead. He found a golden-skinned one with long black lashes. He found Aurora.

She was a nearly-bare skull with the exterior just clinging to her. Ronan lurched away then and back towards the trees, and felt the bile rise in his throat and then he was vomiting and shaking. 

Ronan felt small hands on the back of his neck, and large, firm ones on his shoulders.

"Ronan," Gansey said urgently.

"It's okay," Blue lied, though Ronan could hear her mingled sadness and disgust. "It's okay, Ronan."

It wasn't. Ronan retched until he was through, choked, and retched some more. It was painful to think of his mother. He wanted her. He didn't want anything like her at all. She had so many companions in the turnip patch that it seemed impossible to think Niall, even Niall with all his ingenuity, could have created them all. Were they copies of the real thing? Had Niall first seen them in films? Were they collages, parts taken from magazine women, beer label women, women from billboards on the side of the road? 

There was a soft thud from behind him, from Matthew. Ronan turned without even bothering to wipe away the last of his hurl. Matthew was softly arranging his mother in the grass, the same way he'd seen Ronan arrange the others. There was something pathetic and overpowering about it.

"Don't," Ronan forced out. "Don't touch them, Matthew!"

Matthew stopped. Blue said, "What should we _do_ with them?"

Ronan had not thought that far ahead. He only wanted them out. It was like Niall to bury his secrets and make them sprout, as though each were a fanciful miracle and not a horror. Ronan staggered back to the patch and shoved Matthew aside, and then said, "Just dig them up. No, Matthew. Not you."

Matthew settled back and let the others do it, Blue and Gansey. Noah had disappeared. Ronan's remaining friends each approached the patch gingerly. Blue was unable to hide her horror, and Gansey hid his so anxiously and perfectly that looking to him was almost worse. Ronan looked down at his hands instead, and pulled up another. It was Alice, with the birthmark under her eye. Her hair was much thicker and darker than Ronan would have thought, and she looked very like Aurora, if Aurora were not so pretty. In fact, they all looked vaguely like Aurora. Niall had had a type. Ronan wiped his trembling mouth and wondered which of these women had borne him, which had borne Declan. Maybe Declan's mother was not here. Maybe she had been the real one. That would explain Declan.

"Was mom supposed to go here?" Matthew asked, with Matthew logic. "Since it's a mom patch."

Ronan could not form an answer, only choke in response. He hated the way Blue Sargent's arms came up around him. Ronan clung to her anyway. Gansey said, voice very even, "No, Matthew. Your mother does not belong here."

They arranged the women in a slumbering ring around the clearing. Ronan tried to match flesh to bone, but in some cases, for those near the center of the patch, there was no flesh left. Aurora he set slightly apart from the others. This was his mother. This one. With the flesh more or less on her, in the right combination, she looked so much like Matthew that Ronan could scarcely breathe. He had to steady himself on one of the trees. 

He'd assumed that Matthew had come because Declan had been no good, or maybe too good. Maybe in some long-ago age some long-ago Ronan had wanted a second Declan. But Matthew was nothing like Declan; he was everything like Aurora. Maybe Niall had taken her away, and Ronan had tried to dream her back. 

Matthew was not a perfect copy. But then Ronan's dreams were not quite the same shape as Niall's.

Gansey's hand settled on his arm, as though to ground him. A few months ago, Ronan would have needed it. He did not need it now. He felt horribly clear and clearly horrible. This was to show them what he was, so that they would understand. He needed the truth.

"Does this make you happy?" he asked Matthew. "Sad?"

Matthew shrugged his round, warm bear shoulders. "I don't know," he said. "Should it make me happy? It's another mom. It's nice to have more of her."

Ronan did not correct him. He did not want to tell Matthew what to be.

"If I gave you an apple," he said instead, "would you take it?"

Matthew blinked. 

"Of course," he said.

Ronan stared at him, at this breathing, moving evidence of everything good. Matthew was raw -- not raw the way Ronan was raw, but raw in the way of newness. Freshness. Innocence. No wonder he could not die, no wonder he would only sleep someday. He was good and true in a way that was not meant to be ended, not a person to be killed but instead the best parts of Ronan, refashioned and given new life.

Ronan loved him more than anything else in the world.

"If I told you to bury yourself in this patch--" Ronan forced out, his voice scraped down to a hiss and ugly, so ugly, "--if I told you to bury yourself, and go to sleep. Would you do it?"

Blue inhaled sharply. Gansey said something so horrified that Ronan did not even bother to process it. But Matthew only smiled.

"Do you want me to?" he said. 

"No," Ronan forced out, and moved to him before he could do something stupid, and held him. Matthew was tall, but Ronan was taller, and his arms covered Matthew absolutely.

"Stop," Matthew said, embarrassed.

"No," Ronan said.

"Okay," said Matthew. 

"I'm going to give you an apple," Ronan said. "Not right now. Someday. You, and mom too. It's going to change things. It's going to make things harder. You'll change." He brought his hands to Matthew's face and pulled him in close, memorizing his sheer blamelessness. He said, "I love you. That's why, Matthew. I love you."

Then he tucked Matthew's head into his shoulder and looked beyond Matthew, at where Blue Sargent stood. She looked defiant and impossibly angry by what they'd found in the clearing. She looked just the way she should look. Ronan understood why sometimes it seemed like their thoughts ran together, their fury, their anxieties. Adam and Gansey had been made more magical and terrible and impossible, casualties of Cabeswater or Glendower. But Ronan and Blue had been born that way.

Ronan had little pity for himself, and only a little more than that for Blue.

"Tell him," he said, jerking a thumb back at Gansey. Blue's eyes widened, and Ronan continued regardless. "Not just what you told me," he said. "Everything. Tell him all of it."

Behind him, Gansey said, "Tell me what?"

Ronan pulled Matthew through the trees, and left them to it.

-

Niall's funeral was beautiful, the attendees finer than any Niall had known in life, the mass itself as heartfelt as the Father could make it. It did not suit Niall. But the casket was ceremonial, a lie, and so did suit. And the elder Lynch brothers performed rites worthy of Niall over the coffin: they laid into eachother with everything they had.

Ronan initiated it. It was not over the Barns. His brain would not hold the idea that he was never going home. The words in Niall's will floated in and out again, and he dreamed so much liquor to keep them out that, by the time Gansey forced him into a tie and knotted it for him, he was only angry about the ashes.

Niall had always made it clear that he wanted to be buried at the Barns. That he wanted to be buried, period. It was a joking wish. Niall had not seriously expected to die. It didn't matter. Ronan could still see clear through to the truth Niall was trying to show him. He might have left the Barns more often than he'd stayed, but the Barns was where he'd rested. Created. The Barns was where he belonged, as intact as they could get him.

Declan had him cremated. He put the urn in a showy walnut casket to make people forget that Niall had been beaten to death. He purchased a plot at St. Agatha's.

"No one's going to want to see that anyway, Ronan," he spat at his brother, as Gansey and Father Tom pulled them apart. "Look what seeing him like that did to you."

The truth was somehow more horrible in Declan's mouth. Declan routinely made lies seem so evident and true that the actual truth felt cheaper and more rotten when it came out of him, as though he did not know how to handle it. Ronan lunged at him wildly again and Gansey shoved him back.

"Lynch," he hissed in Ronan's ear. "This is not the time. Your father's right over there."

But it was the time, because he _wasn't_.

The worst part was how Ronan kept thinking of the untapped dreams. Niall had promised him infinite dreams to show him, teach him. Niall had always seemed to say that he knew what Ronan was and could be, that he only needed to close his eyes to make Ronan a worthwhile future, a future Ronan could understand. That someday he would produce a dream and the dream would make sense of the past Ronan couldn't quite resolve. 

"Where were you?" was the question Ronan would ask most often.

Niall would wink and say, "I'll tell you someday."

But he never would. 

"Why I am like this?" was the question Ronan would ask most fervently.

Niall would cuff him lightly around the head and say, "I'll make that clear to you in time."

But he wouldn't.

There was so much Ronan had been promised that he would never receive. There was so much Ronan had _lost_. He pushed off of Gansey and searched for Matthew, the one last thing he had. Called Matthew's name.

"He can't hear you. He's mobbed," Gansey said, catching his shoulder again.

Matthew was mobbed. Declan had invited people from the school, people they knew vaguely from Fairfax and Alexandria, longtime St. Agatha's parishioners they'd only ever seen at mass, longtime friends of Declan no one else ever saw ever. It was not a funeral. It was a testament to Declan's networking skills. Somber black suits and pearls everywhere, sensible high heels and spare packs of tissues used to dab at dry eyes. Where were the rough men who'd drunk late into the night with Niall and then tended the fields and animals all through the day? Where were his traveling carpenters and musicians and toy salesmen, the collection of circusfolk he'd brought back one winter, the violet-eyed nurse who'd appeared the winter they all caught pneumonia and left Niall stunned and Aurora unable to nurse them herself? Where were his friends? 

Ronan had never met Niall's longtime friends. But Ronan felt certain these people were not them. To Declan, this did not matter. Ronan could not prove it. Niall divided up the world into within the Barns and without, and it was only the former he'd ever discussed with Ronan. So Ronan had no idea what Niall had really done, who he'd known, why he'd died, or who he'd made an enemy of. Ronan might never know, and somehow it was that possibility -- a future of not knowing -- that hurt worst and made him angriest.

Ronan had no grief that was not tinged with rage.

Gansey dragged him down the steps to the church courtyard, past pitying women in dark twinsets and men glancing at their watches. The door to St. Agatha's upper school stood open. Gansey could not know what it was and whether they were allowed to pass through it, but he pulled Ronan through anyway. Just beyond that there was an alcove with armchairs and magazines, a waiting area. Gansey pushed him into the armchair furthest from the door.

Ronan had been here before. Often. Whenever Niall had been away too long, Ronan had taken to putting his head on his desk, closing his eyes, and dreaming. Dogs with no heads, but two tails. Dolls with mirrors where their eyes should go. Schoolbags full of red ants. Night horrors. Everything mismatched, wrong. Disordered. Everything rearranged, not by a boy but by something wilder and more unnatural. He couldn't even remember if it had been on purpose.

He thought it must have been. He must have had the idea that, if he did it enough, someone would have to alert Niall, wherever he was, and Niall would have to come home.

He'd dreamt the worst night horror of his life the night after he found Niall. But Niall was not coming home.

He did not understand it, but his chest was shaking and so were his arms. His face was wet. Gansey put a hand on his shoulder and said, "That's right, Lynch," because it was. It was right to cry. But Ronan was not right. Ronan was not sure what he was, but he knew it was not something right.

Niall was not his only parent. Aurora had slipped off to sleep the same day Niall had died, in a chair on the back porch. Neither Ronan nor Declan had bothered to notice. Ronan had only seen the halo of her hair through the kitchen window. He'd shouted to let her know he was up and would be taking his breakfast. Matthew was sitting with her, still and quiet, and when Ronan asked if everything was fine he'd said, "Sure. Is it? Sure. It is, I think."

In the hall, the cat was sleeping, and so were the two inoffensive mice it had been chasing. There were very still beetles clinging to the doorpost, as though they too slumbered. In the shadow of the umbrella stand, a small pink weasel curled into itself, also asleep.

It had already happened. Ronan just hadn't found him yet. And he had not bothered to ask Matthew what he meant. He'd just opened the screen door and gone out to the driveway, because Niall was supposed to be home that day. He'd dithered by the water pump, toeing a strangely slumbering turtle. Niall's death should have come explosively, but that morning had been golden and drowsy, and Ronan had felt like he had all the time in the world.

If he did, he didn't want it. He shoved Gansey away and pushed off from the chair. St. Agatha's seemed small and too close to his body on all sides. There was a gymnasium at the end of the hall where Declan's fencing team had met. Ronan had sometimes peeked through the window in the door to watch his brother practice, hear snatches of excited chatter about the team's overnight trips and competitions. Now he could barely see or hear anything. He moved on instinct and shoved his way through the door, Gansey calling after him.

The door to the gymnasium swung wildly when he shoved it, then loudly clanked shut. Inside, it was dark but for a light above the row of bleachers. Something under them moved like an animal, muscles shifting, haunches somehow distinctly inhuman.

Ronan stepped back. 

The devil under the bleachers adjusted itself, then upended a whole row. It lifted itself onto the resulting wreck, then turned and sniffed. It was as remote from human action as something could possibly be. It did not seem unintelligent, just savage and unpolished, uninterested in behaving like a person. Its penis dangled and it lifted a leg to piss on the gymnasium floor, shooting Ronan the middle finger as it did so. 

Ronan realized that he had never encountered Niall's night horrors. He did not know what they looked like. A remote and terrified part of his brain wondered where Gansey was. A more present part brought up his fists. 

"Get down, you fucking bastard," someone said. The devil turned and presented himself in the direction of the voice. The voice said, in the same lilting tones Niall had once used, "I'll cut it off if I have to look at it one more time. Don't think I won't."

The devil farted and jumped down, then loped to the rear locker entrance and vanished through it. The voice came forward, and it was not a voice, just a chilly little woman with a birthmark below her eye and hair much darker than expected. 

Alice.

Except that Ronan did not think Alice first. He thought Aurora. In the weak light, he realized for the first time how much Alice looked like her, though Alice was shorter, rounder in less pleasing places, narrower-chinned. Nothing Alice wore suited her. She appeared to have begun dressing up for a funeral, and then given up halfway through and thrown on workaday clothes instead. She said, "Sorry, that was mine," in a way that indicated she was not sorry at all.

Ronan disliked her instantly. 

"You came for the funeral?" he demanded.

But Alice was already turning away, following the direction of her night horror.

"How did you know him?" Ronan tried again, voice echoing in the gymnasium.

He crossed to meet her, to force her to talk to him. She turned. She looked like she thought Ronan was wasting her time. She said, "He was my true love. What do you think?"

"He was married," Ronan said, white rage in his veins. "He wasn't yours. He was married."

"I never said I wanted him," said Alice. "I said he was my true love. I'd sooner marry Bluebeard, personally. I'd sooner marry a nuclear bomb."

She rolled her eyes and turned away again. Ronan did not want to let her go. He felt hollow, like there was wind whistling around inside of him. He felt as ugly and savage as Alice and her devil. He wished he could trade her for his mother, but Alice was real and Aurora unreal. Or maybe Alice was not so real, but she was awake. 

"Did you leave him?" he forced out. "Or did he leave you?" 

Somehow it seemed important to pin that down.

"He liked things that were unreal," said Alice. "He liked everything easy, even if it was only easy for him and no one else. He liked anything as long as he could make it something he liked."

This was so circular that Niall might have come up with it himself. Ronan's cheeks were wet again, and his hands were clenched and shaking with rage. Again he stepped towards her, but before he made it far he heard the heavy doors to the gymnasium creak open behind him.

"Ronan?" Matthew said. "Gansey said you were looking for me."

Ronan turned to him. He stood golden and warm in the doorway, and not for the first time Ronan wondered what magic he had, this little brother. It was impossible for Ronan not to look to him. Matthew always seemed to hold the promise of comfort. Next to the out-of-date, devilmaking, ordinary Alice, he seemed miraculous. He seemed to have been made to steady Ronan in moments like these.

"Ah, see," Alice said. "You're no different from your father."

When he turned back to her, full of rage, she was gone.

-

Niall must have been (like many wonderful things, and all periods of unreality, and most lies, and most secrets) a time bomb. 

It could not end well. It would end with the flesh melting off. If you listened, you could hear the ticking. But you never listened.

After he took Matthew back to school, he sat alone in Monmouth, waiting for Gansey. Gansey didn't come back until nightfall, and when he did come he didn't stay long. He was in magnificent disarray, his shirt unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up. His eyes were colder and sharper than they'd been in some time, his handsome face arranged to convey blank power. He moved with purpose, electricity. This was Ronan's favorite Gansey, a Gansey designed for confrontation. A Gansey of ultimatums. A Gansey to challenge death.

"How long did you know?" he asked Ronan, point-blank.

"Not too long," Ronan said. 

"And Noah?" Gansey demanded.

Ronan figured Noah had always known, but Noah could speak for himself. Gansey moved around the room, throwing things into his schoolbag in a hurry. He did not ask about Adam. There was no universe in which Adam Parrish could not have figured it out long before the rest of them. When Gansey was done, he lifted a hand like a silent farewell. Or possibly a fuck you. Then he headed for the door.

Ronan thought he had maybe never asked Niall the right question. It was not _where were you?_ that had mattered. It was not even _what am I?_ For the first time in nearly two years, Ronan reached willingly for his phone.

Declan picked up on the second ring. He sounded panicked.

"Who is this? What happened? What are you doing with him?"

Ronan let him go on a bit. He still did not have the question. He did not speak until he had it.

"Declan," he said.

" _Ronan_?" said Declan, so confused that for once his tone seemed earnest.

"How do you know you have it in you to not be a piece of shit?" 

Matthew had always been living proof. But that would not last for long. Matthew deserved to be more than that.

There was a pause.

"Fuck you, Ronan," Declan said, and hung up the phone. 

Ronan stared into Monmouth's chilly gloom for a few minutes. He and Declan had gone on for years speaking separate languages. There was no bridge for them anymore. He wondered if this was what would happen with Matthew. If Matthew would ever forgive him. 

At the very least, soon Matthew would have a choice about it.

Chainsaw slumbered in his room and Ronan woke her up. There would be time enough for that someday. Outside, the BMW lurked under a tree, borrowed aggression just waiting for Ronan to take it up again. But Ronan was tired. He got in the car and drove to St. Agnes, where all was dark. He went to Boyd's and to the trailer factory and to the movie theater where Adam worked weekends, and Adam was not there. Anxious, Ronan drove to the trailer park and made the rounds of it a few times. Adam's old trailer was dark. Ronan debated visiting hospitals, clinics. He debated visiting Fox Way, as this seemed the likeliest place for Adam to be, and yet Ronan knew it would be too soon to knock on Blue's door.

He found Adam at two in the morning, at the Soaps'n'Suds laundromat just off the main highway. He was sitting in a hard plastic chair and carefully counting out quarters. A half-empty laundry sack rested at his feet, a corner of Ronan's dream-coverlet peeking out over the top. Ancient washers and dryers shook all around him, creaking fans whirred noisily overhead. There was not a single living thing beyond Adam and the girl at the counter and a potted succulent dying slowly in front of her. Adam seemed more washed out and colorless than usual in this environment, but when Ronan sat next to him and examined him he could see that his eyes were brighter, the hollows beneath them distinctly less pronounced than before.

Adam did not say anything at first. He finished counting out his quarters, sorting them into pockets in twos and threes. Ronan let him. Chainsaw tried to perch on a shaking washing machine, found it unpleasant, and flew up to the ceiling to torment the fans.

Adam said, "Why'd you do that to Blue?"

He sounded hard and angry. He was no Gansey; he was unable to keep it from creeping onto his face. His lips were thin and terse, his spare brows drawn. Ronan took him in. He did not enjoy making Adam angry as much as he enjoyed making Adam anything but distant, and anger was at least something Ronan instinctively understood. And Adam angry was no less easy to look at. Ronan thought this tattered, elegant kind of beauty could weather anything.

"Had to be done," he said.

Adam buried his head in his hands, but did not correct him. The laundromat attendant came out from behind her counter and dying succulent and began to make noise about Chainsaw. Ronan stared at her in stony silence until she left them alone. It was easy for Ronan to get most people to back off. It had always been easy. As a child he'd sometimes carried his night horrors in his pockets. Now they were as good as painted on his skin: the truth. 

He was shoulder to shoulder with Adam Parrish, and a part of him felt sick at the thought that only the thin layer of Adam's jacket kept Adam from touching the bars and brambles inked on Ronan's back. Another part felt rapturous, heady.

"What you said," he began, "about mom and Matthew. Even if they change, I want to do it. Let's do it."

Adam put his hands down and stared at him. His eyes were dark and remote. He said nothing.

"Hi, asshole. I'm talking to you," Ronan said, kicking out his feet and sitting back. Settling in. Their shoulders were no longer touching that way. It was a relief, and it made Ronan furious. He looked sideways at Adam, at the way the light played on his cheekbones, his fragile fair skin.

Adam said, after a moment, "I'm good at secrets, you know."

Though his accent came through, his tone was eerily undisturbed. Ronan felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up and heat flush through him. Adam, in his anger, seemed pitiless and full of magic. 

_Magician_.

"I watch people well. And I make connections," Adam continued. "That's how I figured out it was Gansey. I just looked to see how Blue reacted when she talked about her death list."

Ronan toed a cracked tile on the laundromat floor until a part of it broke cleanly. 

"I'm not reading into anything when you look at me," Adam said. He was by now breaking the _g_ s clean off of his words, but his voice remained steady. "I'm not being vain, or dumb. I'm right. I'm right when I think you--"

He stopped. Ronan was enraged and elated at the same time. He wanted to tell Adam to keep going. He suspected that he had loved Adam Parrish long before Cabeswater, but now that Cabeswater was involved it was easier. Magician. Like Adam was something like him. Like Adam would be reckless, and horrible, and wild.

It made Ronan feel nauseous and corrupt, and yet he thrilled with it. This was the one for him. Someone who would say the things Ronan could not, both the great things and the ugly things. Someone to uncover all the secrets.

But instead Adam said, sounding angry, "You don't get it. I _told_ you. The Dreaming Tree says it's going to be me. I'm the reason Gansey won't last the year."

Ronan felt blackly furious in an instant. Cheated.

"And the maggot thinks it's her," he snapped. "Christ, Parrish. _That_ 's how you end that?"

"How else am I supposed to end it?" Adam said. He was shouting now. The counter girl was looking alarmed. Ronan, without really realizing he was doing it, flicked a wrist at Chainsaw. Chainsaw landed on the counter and kerah-ed with menace. The counter girl edged away into a back room, abandoning the succulent. Chainsaw began to pick at it.

Adam noticed none of this. Ronan seemed to have pushed him into his own black and furious place. He stood and shoved wildly, uselessly, at one of the washing machines.

"There is only one way this," he said, gesturing at himself and at Ronan, "is going to end. And I told you. I saw it in the Dreaming Tree."

Ronan stood up too. He'd once had an inch or two on Adam, but if he still did it was irrelevant. He'd seen Adam sullen and elevated in his dreams. He would not, could not tower over Adam. He could simmer with unpredictability, but in his own way Adam could too. So Ronan's anger crested and found no outlet. He wished Adam would hit the washing machine again. They could each hit a washing machine. They could wreck the whole place.

Adam did not hit the machine. He looked like he might, but settled for steadying himself on it instead. There was a quiet control to this that he was probably unaware of. It was deliberate and beautiful and wholly Adam; there was nothing in the gesture that could have been prompted by Cabeswater or influenced by Ronan. 

Something that had lodged in Ronan's bones seemed to fall away, leaving him lighter than before.

"You're the magician," Ronan said, after a minute. "If that's the ending, then so what? Make a new one."

It seemed clear to Ronan that this should have been Adam's response. Adam-Adam. The ancient, original part of Adam that had not always been magic, but had always been defiant and determined. Adam closed his eyes. His lashes glittered with wet.

"I'm trying," he said, after a minute. "But it doesn't change what I saw. What you looked like."

Ronan had seen his own visions in the Dreaming Tree. But Ronan knew dreams and dreamers, and dreams did not always stay the same. Going from unreal to real carried consequences. A hidden pinprick could sprout beaks, feathers. A beloved wife and mother, dreamt by the wrong mind, would come out not quite the right shape. Even Niall hadn't seemed able to perfect his dream, make it pass into reality the right way. Niall had forty or fifty rough drafts that he'd buried in the forest clearing. 

"Who cares?" Ronan said. "I looked angry. When the hell don't I look angry, Parrish?"

Adam looked at him in the weak laundromat light. He seemed to be seriously considering the question. Ronan had somehow unseated him, thrown him off. After a moment, he smiled, but the smile was a worn thing.

"You don't want me to answer that question," he told Ronan quietly. 

Ronan was about to retort. He did not get the chance to. The the lights flickered. The machines whirred too loudly, even the ones that were not running. Everything was noise. The tiles under their feet began to show spiderweb cracks, and then larger and larger ones. 

Ronan thought: _Cabeswater_. 

But it wasn't. It was Noah.

Noah peeled himself out from a spot of nothing, every part of him there and every part of him undulating, slippery as wet flesh. The machines thundered louder. He opened his mouth. He was reflected in every dingy round whirring window. He turned, and every time he caught sight of one of these mirrors he flickered violently. Ronan did not understand what was happening until too much time seemed to have passed, or else none at all. Noah was screaming. Noah was coming closer.

Adam tried to shoved Ronan out of the way before Noah got too close. Ronan tried to shove Adam. The end result was that neither moved at all, though both promptly became more irritated with each other. This was good. Irritation drive out some of the fear. There was no teenage boy to Noah now, no _something more_ to him. Adam did not look surprised by this.

"Noah," Adan said. Then he echoed Ronan exactly. "It had to be done."

For all of Adam's anger at him before, Ronan thought he could detect a perverse relief there. Ronan had thought this might happen, but it still felt another lightness pass through him. Expecting was not being certain.

Noah came closer, not by moving but simply by rearranging the space. Up close, his skin stretched and became pockmarked with clear pieces of nothing, irregular holes of non-existence. Ronan felt both nauseous and responsible. He reacted on instinct and this time succeeded in shoving Adam behind him. He raised his fists.

"How is that going to work?" Adam shouted, struggling to pull Ronan back from the ever-growing pall of Noah that was coating the fans and the washing machines and the counter. Chainsaw flapped wildly about, screeching. Ronan shouted at her to get away.

"You're the magician!" he told Adam again. "Figure it out! We need to get him back to being Noah!"

But as soon as he said that he realized what little sense it made. _Back_ implied that there was a forwards or a backwards in Noah's timeline. But Noah had no timeline, not anymore. 

As if to answer this, Adam said, "There is no Noah."

Ronan almost whirled on him in rage. He did not just want to fight the not-Noah; now he wanted to fight everything. 

"Fuck you," he shot at Adam, over his shoulder.

"I'm serious," Adam said evenly. When Ronan did dare to glance at him, his face was pale and he seemed to be struggling to stay present. He said, "He's sweet around Blue, he's devoted around Gansey. Around you, he's wild. Around me, he's faded and fearsome. Don't you get it? He can't hold any of what he used to be in himself. He's got the pieces of himself lodged in other people. Maybe in things other than people. _We_ make Noah. We dream him. Change us, change anything in the environment, make it darker and wilder, and he changes too."

"He's normal enough when he's with me," Ronan spat.

"Well," Adam said, " _Incorruptus_."

There had been a small and very black part of Ronan that had twisted in pleasure the first time he'd heard Adam handle this term. He did not have time to examine in this part now. Noah was swallowing the time. His eyes were huge and black and Ronan knew he did not want to look into them. They would be mirrors. They would reflect something angry and explosive, the most ancient part of Ronan, that part that felt most real because Ronan had known it the longest.

Timeless.

Ronan realized what he would need to do. He said to Adam, "Distract him!"

"What?" Adam said. 

Ronan ducked out to the side. He pressed himself against the screaming wall of dryers. Noah flickered as though uncertain. To react and go after Ronan would leave him facing more of those mirroring windows, whirling reflections. He advanced towards Adam instead. Adam stood still and let him. His earlier disdain over Ronan's protectiveness made sense; he had defenses better and stronger than Ronan's fists. The pieces of tile beneath his feet shifted aside and a latticework of brambles and vines sprang up, thistles and prickly spiked things, and nets of fungi that exploded into heavy dust. The dust coated Noah and he shrieked, drowning out the machines. While Noah was occupied, Ronan dove for Adam's laundry bag. He tugged out the coverlet and told himself that it did not matter if now Noah seemed to be everywhere. This was dreaming in real life, and in dreams even the whole world could go neatly locked in a coffin.

He threw the coverlet onto Noah. There was a great absence of sound, not so much silence as void. It was sudden and painful and Ronan's ears rang with it. He threw his hands over them and closed his eyes, trying to drive out the sensation. When he opened them again he was looking at Adam holding his right ear and grimacing.

The laundromat was destroyed. Vines and brambles had burst open parts of the walls. Noah had done the floor and ceiling. Most of the machines were now cracked clear across and smoking, revealing their workings. The one Adam had been using was oozing bubbles in the front, cheerily aflame in the back. Adam himself was again coated in a thick array of dust, and Ronan felt something uncomfortable on the back of his neck. When he brushed his hand there, it came away coated in ceiling plaster. The coverlet was splayed flat on the floor between them, looking filthy and cheap. Ronan picked it up. 

"Excuse me?" someone said.

It was the girl from before, emerging from a side door and looking terrified.

"You need to leave," she said. "If you don't leave, I'm calling the police." Then she looked around at the room and said, "Actually, even if you stay, I'm calling the police."

Ronan was ready to argue, but caught sight of Adam. He was staring fixedly at a point on the wall, looking very removed from the situation. It was not elegant removal. It was numb. He moved a hand mechanically to cover his face, as though he thought he might be hit there. When Chainsaw came down from the ceiling to kerah softly at him, he stared as her like he could not tell what she was.

Ronan understood now why it had seemed so important to stand between him and Noah. He took Adam's sleeve and drew him out of the laundromat, away from this last explosion. Chainsaw followed them into the night.


	5. Chapter 5

Because Ronan had set off his own kind of detonator at the Barns, hooked together the pieces and watched Gansey go off in the aftermath, he could not bring himself to take Adam there now. 

The Barns was a miracle, sacrosanct. It would always be home. Ronan would not give it up or see it taken again. But he felt that he'd changed it, exposed it to time and consequences. It was not a place untouched by horror. It would have to be a truer place than that.

So he drove the BMW to a back road, a road hidden behind a corner of Henrietta like a secret. He decided that he wanted this road for tonight. It was still moonlit, but morning mist was creeping over the cracked asphalt. Personable trees drooped low above both the BMW and the Hondayota trailing just behind. The road seemed as mundane as it was magical. It felt like the right place.

Still, Ronan's hands trembled when he stopped the car.

Noah, too, was a timeless thing he'd subjected to time and change. This was even worse than changing the Barns. Ronan's mind edged around the topic, but Noah still lingered uncomfortably around the edges. 

Ronan gathered up the coverlet and went to let himself into the Hondayota.

In the drivers' seat, Adam wore silence as absolutely as he wore his own skin. His gaze was still remote.

"Think I'll get another tattoo," Ronan said into the silence, settling into the ratty, ancient passenger seat. He picked at his wristbands. After weeks of feeling too big for his skin, it should have felt good to feel like he'd finally exploded, ripped apart, made a wreck.

It didn't. And a part of him had known it wouldn't.

Next to him, Adam shifted, like he was having difficulty hearing him. He nodded in response to Ronan's comment. The nod came a few seconds delayed.

Ronan tried again. "It's good that you didn't wash this," he said, hitting the coverlet lightly. 

Again, Adam responded mechanically. He looked down at his hands from somewhere very far away. He said, after a minute, "Didn't know if it was machine-washable." 

"What do you think I am, Parrish?" Ronan snapped. 

He was more irritated by the assumption that he wouldn't know what to dream for Adam than he was by Adam's blank non-responsiveness. He said, "It's a fucking blanket. I'm not going to make it dry-clean only."

Adam's dusty lashes flickered in annoyance. He seemed to come alive in response to Ronan's anger, his own ire rising to the surface. Ronan's heart always had space for anger in it, so this seemed appropriate. It did not worry Ronan.

"You didn't give me a care manual for your dream blanket," Adam said coldly. "I couldn't know if it--" 

He broke off. Sat up straight. For one instant, Ronan saw not the boy Adam was now but the thin, worn-down creature he'd first met in the checkout line.

"My clothes are all back there," Adam said, with sudden and certain dread. "And my sheets."

Adam's coveralls and camo pants had probably been well-worn and ready to be trashed at the time Adam had picked them up at the Goodwill. And next to all of their current problems -- Blue betrayed, and Noah gone, and wild Gansey awakened -- this was so ordinary that to be upset about it was laughable. Ronan had no frame of reference for this problem. If it were him, he'd buy new clothes. Or dream them. So it should have pissed him off again to find Adam so concerned with something so stupid. It should have nettled him, this further proof that Adam was sometimes too caught up in dust to care about provocation and magic and dreams. 

It didn't. After Matthew, after Niall-and-Aurora, after hearing Adam's take on Noah, Ronan felt relief.

He said, trying to be helpful about the situation, "Your clothes made you look like a loser. You looked like a fucking farmer in those coveralls."

Adam stared at him. 

"You _own_ a farm," he said.

Ronan frowned. "Yeah, and I still don't look like shit," he pointed out.

For a second, Adam looked marvelously enraged. Contempt lit up his whole face, his feathery brows, his deep blue eyes. He looked close to the Adam of Ronan's dreams. Ronan had seen this disdainful creature so many times now, and still could not decide what was more powerful: his love for this Adam, or how scared he felt to think that he might be beneath Adam's notice. 

Ronan was not good with words. He still tried to make himself known. He said, more carefully than even he thought he was capable of, "I'm trying to be helpful."

Adam said nothing. He exhaled hard, thin shoulders rising and falling. Then he turned away and leaned back, pressing his dusty head into the Hondayota's ancient headrest. His eyes tracked something on the roof of the car. His mind was not on Ronan now. It could be on any of a million things -- his clothing, his parents, his schoolwork, his regular work. Gansey-Noah-Blue. To see Adam reviewing problems in his head was an intensely private thing. He was usually blank and wary. He was Gansey's watchful advisor, a complement to Ronan's heedless outbursts. Ronan offered ignition. Adam offered solutions.

But generally no one got to see him arrive at them. Ronan felt cracked open by it somehow. 

Because Adam was no longer even thinking of him, he settled blackly into his corner of the car and picked at the coverlet. He wondered if he should rip it apart and make a clean one that came with a clear tag:

M A C H I N E W A S H A B L E, ASSHOLE. 

He didn't.

After a few minutes of quiet, he said, "Just because you're poor doesn't mean you have to look poor, Parrish. You can look like whatever you want to. Blue's poor and you don't even notice some days, since she dresses like a hippie dwarf fucked Maleficent."

Adam turned to look at him, and for a second his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

"You know," Adam said. "The rest of us were told at some point in our lives that we should only talk if what we had to say was more beautiful than silence."

"Yeah, but I think we all know who told you that, Parrish," Ronan said. 

Robert Parrish and his wife had never thought that what Adam had to say was better than silence. Gansey would have pressed this point, but Ronan didn't need to and didn't want to. Adam Parrish was more than that. Adam had changed since Cabeswater, but it was more accurate to say that Adam had changed since leaving the trailer park. 

Adam had not changed to meet what Ronan wanted. Adam had changed to become what Adam deserved to become. So the real fear was not that Adam was turning into something that Ronan liked too much. The real fear was that Adam might remain something Adam didn't like. That thought made something course through Ronan that he could scarcely identify. It was close to anger, but not quite. He thought it might be sadness. He had rarely felt it undiluted by rage. He didn't like it. His nails shredded faint red lines into the skin between his wristbands. 

"I can dream you new clothes," he said roughly. "Even if you just want the same shit. I did this. I changed Gansey. I changed Noah. You lost all your stuff because of it. I'm going to fix that."

It was not a request. What he gave to Adam, he gave freely. If Adam could not see what Ronan gained from that, and how Ronan needed to give, then Adam was not so much principled as he was deluded.

But Adam only said, "Forget the clothes."

Ronan stared at him. He was looking down at his fair, careful hands. He said, "I get it. You can dream them or buy them and it's nothing to you. I get it."

"It's not nothing," Ronan snarled. He felt alive in a way he hadn't a second before. He felt like he was starting to know not just Adam, but himself. It was something. It was something. It was: 

How do you know you have it in you to be more than a piece of shit?

This was how. This.

But Adam's voice was becoming loud and ruthless. He said, "Yeah, but obviously it's not what it is to me. So just tell me. Why me, then? Why me, if I need this much help all the time? Why me, if I look like shit, if I come from shit?"

"You don't always look like shit," Ronan snapped. "And you're not what you come from. It's not nothing when I do things for you. I know that. It's not nothing to me. Maybe I don't have to care about all the same things you have to care about. But I need to care about you."

He realized too late that this felt like the largest thing he had ever said. Maybe it wasn't the largest. _Life isn't all just sex and drugs and cars_ \-- that had been a good one. That had been the first time Ronan had felt like he could be something more than a walking explosion.

But this put words to the something more. This felt bigger. This hung in the air, rattled by the Hondayota's creaky, barely-there heating. Ronan felt like he could see it swell in the space between them. He pressed himself against the door and window without realizing he was doing it, trying to give this more space. Ronan was not a small person, but this seemed bigger than the dimensions of his body. 

Adam, in the drivers' seat, seemed to think so too. He leaned back again and closed his eyes. He looked delicate, his fine bones stark and fragile-seeming. Ronan thought of how deceptive this was. Ronan thought he could speak a single word and kill it, the truest thing Ronan had ever said. 

_Magician._

But Adam looked still and tired. An older Adam. An old, old Adam. Maybe the side of himself Adam was most used to, the way Ronan was most used to explosive anger.

"Why?" Adam said again. His voice was ugly and even. It was the voice he used to read aloud in class. He spoke like he was assembling all the evidence, or presenting an obvious solution. He said, making every word very clear, "I'm not like you. I can't rework time, or make whole people. I don't dream miracles. I'm warped. Everything is so _big_ for me, even when it's small. You don't have time for that. You were born big." 

For so long, Ronan had kept almost nothing beyond anger in his heart. Now he felt like it threatened to burst with something far, far worse.

"I want you," he snapped. "If you don't want me back, Parrish, then say it. Don't feel like you can't say it because it's not more beautiful than silence, or because you think I only make miracles, or some horseshit like that."

Feeling wild and brutal, he considered another detonation. Unleash the secret. Tell Adam everything. The belief he'd had, for so long, that this was nothing and could be nothing, because he was a walking wreck and Adam Parrish was Adam Parrish. The sense that Cabeswater had done this, that it was not something natural and right in Ronan. That all this was was some imperceptible magic molding Adam, nothing more than the dream forest delivering to Ronan an Aurora.

Adam made careful connections. Ronan made reckless leaps.

They could both be spectacularly wrong, though, wrong enough to torch themselves and the people they loved. So if Adam was going to let this go up in flames, then Ronan could more than match him.

But he didn't. He put the coverlet down between the seats, where Adam would find it when he was ready. He opened the passenger-side door with a clunk. It was too heavy for the car. Ronan regarded it with disgust and stepped out.

Before he started back to the BMW, he said, "If you don't want me back, it won't change anything. I'm still here. It's if you want me back that things change."

Ronan would not pretend that he was a gift. Adam could pretend, but Ronan wouldn't. Ronan Lynch was a walking war. He was every hidden truth and secret just waiting to go off. 

He was climbing into the BMW when Adam darted out of his own car. In the rearview mirror, Ronan saw his long limbs jerking wildly, his elegance giving way to some momentary frenzy. Adam stopped before the open door of the BMW, motionless, careful-seeming. But there was an unpredictability there too, a mutinous element. He was covered in dust and sweat, his eyes red, his thin mouth set. He was not especially beautiful. He was a challenge. 

"Okay. If that's what you think. Let's change things," he said quickly. He sounded reckless and thoroughly Henrietta. He looked down at Ronan expectantly. Half-terrified.

Ronan stood.

He put his hands on Adam very carefully, the touch he had until now reserved for his dreams. He slipped a hand under Adam's dusty t-shirt. The skin there was hot and hard and alive. He seemed like a part of the land itself, an obstinate part that could not let itself be buried or destroyed. 

"Ronan," Adam said again, bringing his hands around to Ronan's back and tracing the brambles there. His voice shook. Ronan understood that this was Adam's way of detonating. He said, "Ronan, let's change things."

-

There was one recurring dream that never seemed to become reality. It never needed to. It came often in the years before Niall died. It came whenever Niall was away, and so Ronan assumed it was sent to him by Niall, like a calling card or a letter in the mail. If Niall could dream the world, then surely Niall could dream Ronan's dreams.

In the dream, Ronan was in his bed in his room in his home. The Barns was golden and drowsy. On the floor, there was the rug Aurora had made. On the sill, there was a collection of things that Declan had pinned to cardboard just for Ronan, though Declan always said he did not like to do that. Ronan was in the bed. He had all his things around him like a protective hedge. He had the living teddy bear, and the pink weasels. He had the wooden duck that clucked, that the peg-legged carpenter had made for him. He had many glittering beetles that crawled around him, but only sometimes on him. He felt safe.

Niall sat in the chair by the window, holding something. He was huge. His hair and brows were frightening in their blackness. But Ronan was not frightened. Ronan never had to be frightened of Niall. He flicked beetles at Niall and Niall flinched, and that was how Ronan knew this could not be the real Niall anyway. He was only another improbable dream, sitting there like an explosive on a leash. He simmered, and Ronan did not care. 

When Niall spoke, he sounded slow and frustrated, like he was trying to learn a whole new language. His heavy accent clouded up the words so much that Ronan felt confident ignoring him entirely. He said, "You have to tell me how you did this, Ronan. And _why_."

Ronan fed the bear some glittering beetles and watched them light up its insides. The bear smacked its lips. This was more absorbing than watching Niall sitting darkly by the window.

But when Niall shook the bundle he was holding, it cooed. Ronan looked up. Maybe the bundle would do something interesting. It didn't. It kept cooing. Ronan was more interesting than that. When people shook Ronan, he screamed and screamed. He said, "Jesus Christ!" This was a thing he'd learned to say from Niall. Sometimes he would say it in church and the real Niall would say it back and carry him outside, with many frightening looks at the priest. In the courtyard he would bounce Ronan on his knee and call him a wild thing. Ronan enjoyed this. 

"We don't need her anymore," Niall said now. "Do you understand? I can make you a better one. I've always tried to make sure you had the best one. the best of everything. I'm doing it for you."

Ronan threw more beetles at him. Some of them caught on the bundle and Niall, looking horrified, batted them away. When they fell to the ground they burrowed into the wood of the floorboards and Niall cursed. Ronan watched them eat their way downstairs, leaving small holes to mark their tracks. They were many-colored and they shone, but they had millions of ugly legs and clacking pincer parts. Ronan realized that Niall was scared of them. This was further proof that it was a dream. It made no sense for large Niall to be scared of something so small. And there were so many of them -- what would be the point? Ronan tried to step on them sometimes, and it only meant that he squished them into more and more beetles. Every attempt to kill them only made them smaller and more numerous, like they weren't beetles at all.

"Come away from those horrors," Niall said, voice thick and heavy. 

Again: a dream. It had to be. The real Niall did not sound like this. Mountains did not cry. 

"Ronan," Niall said again. "Come away."

Ronan shook his head stubbornly. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. What a stupid request. Jesus Christ. If he came away, he'd only encounter the beetles somewhere else. 

Niall's horror beetles coated every inch of the Barns. There was no escaping them. 

"I can bring her back, do you understand?" Niall said. He sounded tricky now. He was a bargain-maker now. This was closer to the real Niall. He shook the bundle again and the bundle took it soundlessly, without complaint. 

Niall said, "Is that what this is, Ronan? Is that what you want? Maybe you should try to show me what happened, and I'll try to give you what you want. Wouldn't that be nice, Ronan? Why don't you show me what happened? If it hurts, you have to show me."

"Jesus Christ," Ronan informed him calmly.

Niall stood and towered, blocking out the light. He came close and with one hand he picked Ronan up and lifted him out of the bed, shaking him so that the beetles fell off. Ronan decided that this time he liked the shaking. He helped by waving his limbs and his head, squirming all over, shaking and shaking and shaking.

Niall cursed again, a giant thwarted by a child. He could only truly lift Ronan when Ronan stilled. He hefted Ronan over one shoulder. Ronan beat his fists against Niall's back because he could. Niall said, "Fucking Christ. A hurricane. I made a hurricane. I should have dreamt myself all my sons."

The bundle in his other arm cooed. Niall took both Ronan and the bundle out into the hall and up the stairs, retreating into his room. There were no beetles here. It was dark and cool and smelled like rain and living things. Like Niall. Ronan appreciated this. He grabbed handfuls of Niall's shirt. He put the shirt in his mouth and bit down and growled to show his appreciation. 

The baby Niall dropped into a bassinet by the window, as though he were unsure what else to do with it. Ronan he tried to swing onto the bed, but his shirt was still in Ronan's teeth. It rode up and tangled Niall together with Ronan.

"Jesus Christ!" Niall said in earnest.

"Jesus Christ!" Ronan sang happily. "Jesus Christ!"

Niall ceded the shirt to him entirely as he dumped Ronan on the bed. Ronan fell happily into the warm blankets and pillows, where he squirmed and moved like he was a beetle himself, a terrible creature with thousands of legs. No, a bird. He had thousands of beaks. He made cawing sounds and piled all the pieces of the bed around himself like he was making a nest, a home. He thought he was a bird without a mother and would have to make his own nests now. It was very sad. His caws became mournful.

Niall towered above him for a moment, stripped to his undershirt, his face in shadow. He said quietly, "You didn't get it quite right, little hurricane. You made a brother, not a mother. You're going to have to get better at theft, don't you think?"

Ronan balled his hands into fists and stuck them against his cheeks. 

"No," he insisted. "No."

He hadn't stolen anything. He was a bird that had wanted its mother. He had gone into the forest and asked for her -- a pretty golden bird, the same general shape as him, a little bigger, just as new, except that Ronan was black and not golden. But he loved her very much. And the forest had given him exactly a golden thing to love, which was what he had wanted.

This dream Niall was so stupid.

"No," Ronan said again, this time very firmly.

Niall stared at him. He did not speak so much as bark. 

"You stole it," he said. Then he looked briefly annoyed and amended this. "Not it. Him. It's a him. You stole him, Ronan, you must have." 

"No!" Ronan said. "I didn't!"

Niall was so large and glowering that he covered the whole room with it. He said, "You stole it, and there'll be scars from that. You have to let me see what they are. I can show you how to do this, Ronan. For Christ's sake."

He dropped onto the bed, loose-limbed and massive, the largest thing in the world. He lifted Ronan into his lap and began to check him all over, checked his hands and his feet and his legs and his chest. Ronan squirmed and yelled, yelled not from upset but anger. Niall was sitting on his nest.

"My God," Niall kept saying. "My God, my God." 

Ronan did not know why Niall was checking him. There was nothing wrong with him.

Niall came to this conclusion a few moments later.

"There's nothing the matter," he said. He said it like something was the matter. He said it like he held a big truth in his mouth, and it was scalding him. 

"You're not hurt. You're not burned down by it. You didn't even feel it, did you? It didn't make you sneak in and scrape yourself raw."

"Caw," Ronan said. "Jesus Christ, Niall."

Niall was undeterred. He picked Ronan up so that they were at eye level, so that Ronan's blue eyes were looking into his blue eyes. 

"If I were to go there now, it would be whole, wouldn't it?" Niall said. "The line and the forest would be whole."

There was dream shock in his dream tone. Ronan, who was a dream bird, flapped his arms. 

"It gave itself to you," Niall said. 

His eyes were wet. This was the natural illogic of the dream. 

He said, sounding broken, "Ronan. Ronan, do you know what you are?"

"I'm a bird," Ronan informed him.

Dream Niall tucked Ronan into his chest then, and helped him build the nest so they could fall asleep.

They went to the forest together. This was a thing Ronan had never done with the real Niall. Ronan wanted to show dream Niall the trees, the cave, the hollow tree, the bones in the leaves, the writing on the rocks. Orphan Girl. The boy whose hands were the forest. The boy who dreamed of kings. Mirrors.

Because in the dream, for an instant, Ronan's mind flashed with all the pieces of the forest and he knew instinctively that they were there and would be there for him to find someday. In the dream, he wanted to flap his wings over every corner like a bird, to pick out every inch with his beak and bring it back to show Niall.

But dream Niall was very cagey, as though he thought they had to be secretive. Ronan did not agree. The forest liked him. It kept no secrets from him.

It did not like Niall, but then this was not the real Niall. 

Dream Niall said he had to take just one thing, and then he and Ronan would have to leave right away.

When they returned to Niall's nest in his bed in his room, Aurora was there. She surged up like something newly-born, like she only just realized what the world was like. She stretched out her legs like they were curious and wonderful to her, and Ronan laughed because it was like she, too, was a baby bird in the bird game. 

When she found the bassinet she gave a little scream of delight and lifted the baby up. She held it close. Ronan hoped that she would feed it and that it would want worms. They could find Declan and the three of them could cluster around her and Niall. They could open their mouths and caw to ask for food. Niall could dream them worms that were chocolate or popcorn or raw hope. Niall could dream anything.

But when he looked to Niall, Niall had pulled away from the bed, away from Ronan. His eyes were red-rimmed. There was blood all along his arms. He picked splinters and twigs out of the wounds. He looked like he had been attacked by the forest. This time, when Ronan began to cry, it was not from anger. To see Niall bleeding like this made his heart feel too full. Ronan hated it.

"Ronan," Niall pleaded. He raised his bloody arms to Ronan, but stopped just before touching him. "Ronan, look, it was to bring her back."

It was a dream, not the real Niall. The real Niall never seemed to carry even a drop of shame. This Niall brimmed with it.

"Please, Ronan," he said. "Don't cry. Do you understand? I thought we were the same. I wanted us to be. I was wrong. I'm sorry, Ronan. Please. I love you. Never doubt that I love you. I love you. That has to count for something, Ronan."

He sounded like he was pleading. He said it again, and again and again and again. I love you. I love you. Like this was the dream he wanted most of all, and could not quite perfect.

-

Under the blanket, where time slowed to a crawl, Ronan had the dream again. It was the first time he had had it since Niall died. It was the first time he had felt ready for it.

It was not a message from Niall, but a message from himself. 

Even before he opened his eyes, he stretched out a hand. He found Adam's hand and took it. He marveled at the way Adam's fingers were long and bony. When he tried to cup them they flexed in irritation, marvelously defiant. Ronan lifted them up to his lips and kissed them.

Adam shifted, faced him. He looked as though he hadn't expected the kiss. Ronan felt godlike. He bit along each knuckle lightly. He felt every part of his body align itself into a pleasant pool. He felt the rightness of this. For a moment he considered the ways he could touch Adam. Adam felt like Cabeswater had the first time Ronan had seen it in his dreams: a landscape brimming with possibility, all the magic that might condescend to be his if only he offered it the best of himself.

Adam broke the moment. He was altogether more physical than Cabeswater, more physical than Ronan had expected. His hands cupped the back of Ronan's head, stronger than they looked, pulling Ronan in. It was heady and powerful, magic manipulating Ronan for once. Ronan let himself be pulled and was rewarded with kisses along his neck, Adam's breath on his ear. Adam was frantic and present everywhere, hard sparse muscle lined up along Ronan's body, legs kicking apart Ronan's legs. Some knobbly, skinny, Henrietta-bred part of him brushed exactly where it needed to, and Ronan was lit up, breathing hard and unable to think beyond the urge in him. Adam did not seem to realize he had done this; he only dropped his hands down Ronan's back and pulled the rest of him in closer.

He was not a magician, but a wild, touch-starved boy. Ronan had not anticipated this. He had not anticipated that he would like it. Adam handled him with such a mix of care and ferocity that Ronan felt undone. It was precise and furious, everything he wanted. It was kissing a war.

Still, their teeth knocked together. They needed more practice. Lots of practice. Ronan breathed hard and tried again and it was a little better, if still imperfect.

"Sorry," Adam breathed out softly. "Sorry, sorry."

Even overcome, Ronan had to roll his eyes. "Don't fucking apologize," he instructed. He snaked an arm around Adam and tried to get them closer yet, kissed along the fine, fragile collarbones. "I'm not apologizing," he added.

"When do you ever?" Adam said. 

Ronan shifted them so that he was lying above Adam. He looked down with satisfaction at this mix of elegance and plain want. 

"Don't be fucking pert, Parrish," he said, and kissed him again.

But somehow the moment was lost. Adam's urgency gave way to Adam's essential Adam-ness, his depressing tendency to prefer almost anything to freely-given affection. 

"Ronan," he said, pushing Ronan back. "Ronan, Ronan, Ronan." 

Ronan obeyed and looked down at him. He was thankfully not a removed Adam or a distant and pitiless Adam. He was an Adam who was ready to begin, an Adam who had used the extra time afforded by the blanket not to sleep but to work at his problems. He was the too-disciplined, too-careful Adam, the Adam who did not understand that this was worth stopping time for.

Ronan dropped back and rested on his elbows. He would show Adam. He would make time to show him.

"Ronan," Adam said again, sounding determined. "Listen. We have to fix things."

Ronan made a fist with one hand and then let the fingers splay like a sudden explosion, made a satisfied booming sound effect like lies falling to shreds. 

"I blow things up," he said. Then he pointed a finger at Adam. "You fix things."

Adam looked annoyed. He looked angry and free in the way he often was with Ronan, in a way that Ronan didn't care if he apologized for. Ronan wanted to kiss him again. Instead he traced his fingers down Adam's chest. Adam did not tell him to stop.

He did say, "Grow up, Lynch. You have to fix things, too." 

Ronan grinned. He shrugged lightly, even though he knew that Ronan Lynch was not supposed to be light. He was supposed to be a bomb, a boy who could go off at any moment. He faced his problems by blowing them up. 

He knew there were problems out there, beyond this moment. He did not feel like blowing anything up.

"For you, anything," he told Adam easily. 

He moved back in, but Adam held him off and said, sounding pained, sounding guilty, "Not for me. We're trying to change the outcome for Gansey. And Blue. And Noah, if we can do something for him."

Adam seemed to line their friends up in the small space between himself and Ronan. He scanned this space. Looking for connections. Trying to see a way out. Ronan loved him fiercely. He had to touch a hand to Adam's shoulder and back to make sure that this was real and Adam was here. 

"All of you," he agreed, tracing Adam's skin. "For all of you, everything."

He would give all he had for these people, and for Matthew, and for his mother. He would give all his powers of making and all his powers of unmaking. He burst with the giving, but it wasn't a painful burst. He could handle it. He no longer needed to dream his love into a separate body. He could carry it in himself.

"Only you get me this way, though," he informed Adam. "Because love is a fucking sacrament. Which reminds me. For now, the pants stay on. I'm not easy."

"Easy isn't what I would call you, no," Adam said. 

"Like calls to fucking like." Ronan agreed, and kissed him again. 

He was easier than he thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to nonny5 for their correction about P.S. Henrietta. Matthew's cricket logic is from _Late August_ by Margaret Atwood. I just liked that image. Thanks to Jenyfly and isabelthespy for inadvertently inspiring whole bits of this. Title is from Search  & Destroy. Jenyfly did a fantastic [collage](http://jenyfly.tumblr.com/post/130851585008/anyway-heres-my-cover-for-ninnieamees-son-of) for this fic and Viviena did some really phenomenal [fanart](http://viviena.tumblr.com/post/133116909548/one-of-my-favorite-moments-from-my-absolutely) for the Adam/Ronan scene in chapter three. Go check them out and give them both love!
> 
> also, feel free to come talk to me on [tumblr](nimmieamee.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] son of the nuclear A-bomb](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6762727) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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